


Maybe The Seaside Is The Place

by junkshopdisco



Category: Merlin (TV) RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Infidelity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 08:52:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9648764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junkshopdisco/pseuds/junkshopdisco
Summary: Colin’s unbreakable rule about not doing anything romantic with his co-stars leads to a heart broken into pieces around his Merlin boots. Years later, an unexpected reunion with Bradley gives him another chance -- assuming he can make room in his schedule between jobs and existential crises for love, that is.





	

_If you’re going to break a heart, maybe the seaside is the place to do it_ , Colin thinks. 

Clouds bloated with rain skid on the horizon, wind stinging like an echo of something yet to happen as it rushes off the sea and turns grey to spray on the rocks. He licks the salt off his lips and swallows, Bradley’s words pressing down somewhere above his crown. He had a sense that maybe this was coming, the moment stitched into every little conversation about nothing and the way Bradley’s hands always stray to whichever bit of him they can get to quickest. Still, the words actually being out there – wild – makes his heart stammer and a response flounder in his mouth. Colin stares at the spot between Bradley’s eyebrows. _There must be a name for that specific spot, I should look it up, I hate not knowing the proper word for things_. He tries a pre-emptive smile, the kind that can maybe cushion a fall, but even to his own mouth it feels feeble with insincerity.

‘I don’t want you to think I don’t, like, like you,’ Colin says. The nervous smile in Bradley’s eyes flickers like candlelight, as if they’re doing a read-through and he’s just scanned ahead and found the scene isn’t going where he thought and he’s played it all wrong. ‘It’s just sort of my unbreakable rule. I don’t do anything – you know – romantic with people I’m working with. It’s just – ’

‘Yeah, sure. Totally the sensible – ’ 

‘It could get messy and I wouldn’t want to jeopardise – ’

‘It’s fine. I get it. Forget I said anything. I just thought you – for a while, you’ve seemed – well, flirty.’

‘It’s my fault. Sometimes I say things – I never think people will take me seriously.’

With a tight smile and skittish gaze devoid of its usual softness, Bradley gets to his feet, his armour giving off little plastic creaks. 

‘I won’t take you seriously again, Colin. Sorry I ever did.’

The stones skid from his steps as he walks quickly – too quickly – away, and Colin wants to beckon him back and say something more eloquent and kinder and really explain it, but his own words, they never do quite what he intends. He rolls his eyes at himself and goes back to not eating his lunch, something with rice and green stuff in Styrofoam. 

The waves crash – at least drown out the sound of his pulse as it thunders in his earholes – and a moment later, up the beach, Bradley laughs. It carries on the wind, this ostentatious: _me, I’m fine, see? Why wouldn’t I be? Just because we’ve been flirting for years and I finally dredged up the courage to say something about it and you half-arsed your way through a rejection, it doesn’t mean it hurts, Colin._ Colin stabs his cabbage or whatever the fuck it is with his fork. One of the plastic prongs snaps and stays impaled, and his stomach swirls with some momentary sense of fucking kinship for its disconnection from the bigger part of itself.

As Colin sits there with a broken fork and a snapped heart littered about his Merlin boots, he realises that when he gets up, everything will be different. The world of ease and toying, the one populated by only him and Bradley, their secret little language of eyes and eyebrows and jokes no-one else gets – it’s gone, washed away by the tide and a lunchtime confession. He wonders what the fuck will be in its place, and what the hell you do when your world falls out from under you into the nothingness of space.

*

For months they take too wide a path around each other, and when they’re forced to be close it’s all nervous smiles and fake jocularity. Bradley acts his way through it, does a good enough job Colin’s sure he’s the only one who can tell the casual hand on his shoulder isn’t at all, that the easy compliments and smiles cost Bradley quite a lot, and it’s all this perfectly constructed _show_ to stop everyone from knowing.

 _Merlin_ at least plays into their hands – more characters, less Merlin and Arthur, less time for him and Bradley to occupy the same few feet. Makes it easier for Bradley to drift away without anyone noticing. Colin’s glad he has people to laugh and be Bradley with, although sometimes it twists in his side, the thought that once, he had Bradley’s attention always, and now it only falls on him when there are people around who expect him to offer it up.

Inevitably Bradley gets himself a girlfriend. Inevitably Colin’s jealous and avoids her as much as he can, and when he can’t he’s overly nice to the point she actually takes him to one side and tells him very sweetly that she’s flattered but taken. Colin bangs his head on the wall of the castle and a couple of the knights eye him like he’s psycho. He tells them he’s just winding himself up for a scene, and inevitably they believe him because it’s far more logical than the truth.

*

_Other projects_ become a thing to hide behind. Colin says yes to everything, and sometimes he wonders if he’s building a career or a wall of sofa cushions to shield himself from an enemy as imaginary as his protectionary castle.

*

Packing to go to Pierrefonds for the last time – a moment he was always so fucking sure would never actually come – Colin chances upon the programme for a play he did on the previous year’s break. He reads his own entry in it, and wonders if this will be his gravestone epitaph: a list of TV shows, films, plays, and accolades where everyone else has _dear devoted husband/father/child/whatever_. Maybe they’ll bury him with a whole load of programmes, toss them like flowers onto his corpse. Maybe that’d suit him better than roses.

He tells himself to stop being a maudlin bastard and shoves an extra jacket into his holdall, because that’s the sensible thing to do and isn’t he always so fucking sensible?

*

The final day’s shooting of the final episode of the final series ends in a wash of anti-climax. They’ve already filmed all the grandeur and the glory, and the last scene he does with Bradley is a reshoot of something from the middle of the series:

> ARTHUR cuffs MERLIN lightly round the head. MERLIN ducks and dodges out of his way, affronted.
> 
> Merlin:  
>  What was that for?
> 
> Arthur:  
>  Not telling me sooner.
> 
> Merlin:  
>  I didn’t know I could trust you.
> 
> Arthur:  
>  That’s because you’re an idiot, Merlin.

There’s a party, after. Or more a gathering of people too tired to really throw a party in an overgrown tent out the back of a pub. There are stories and laughter and hands clapped on shoulders with congratulatory relief, talk of new projects and adventures. Colin gets way too drunk, trying to drown the sense that it’s really over with glass after glass of whiskey and ginger ale. When the finality is nearly stifling he goes outside, seeking fresh air and sobriety. Instead he finds Bradley under a tree, standing with a pint in one hand and his phone in the other, trying to text with his thumb.

‘Hey.’

Under quiet and starlight it feels like they haven’t spoken in years, even though they spent eighteen hours together only yesterday. Bradley looks up in acknowledgement, finishes his message, and pockets his phone. Colin wants to say something big and important, but he didn’t think ahead and plan, and through the whiskey making words wander lost in his head all he can catch is:

‘That’s it, then.’

‘That’s it.’

‘No more Merlin.’

‘No more Arthur.’

‘I won’t miss the neckerchief.’

‘I won’t miss the armour.’

Colin swallows. He created those guards in Bradley’s eyes. Somehow they make him feel like he’s the one in a cage.

‘What’ll you do with yourself, then?’ Colin says.

‘Holiday. Really long holiday. You?’

‘I’ve a play, then a film.’

Bradley gives him a tight little nod and disappears into a distortion of his own mouth behind his glass. 

‘This,’ Colin says, and waves between them, swaying into a little stagger as he moves. ‘It was – ’

‘Less than it could have been.’

Colin stares at the grass, watching the blades tussle with each other as the wind rustles them but can’t quite pick a direction. What he wants to say is: _ask me again. Say exactly the same thing you said on the beach, and this time I’ll say yes to you because we don’t work together anymore, do we?_ The words that form on his mouth, though, are:

‘We’ll stay in touch, yeah?’ 

‘Sure, mate,’ Bradley says, and walks away, leaving Colin feeling like someone just shoved his insides off a cliff.

*

They do stay in touch, after a fashion. Bradley includes him in group text invites, but Colin declines because he’s usually working and even if he’s not, he’s sure it’s the polite kind of invite, a habit and a show. Sometimes he wishes he could call and eat the conversation on the beach, swallow it down like it was never there, but like in the most clichéd of movies, he gets as far as Bradley’s name in his phone and chickens out.

Months pass, the long and twisted kind that he can’t quite remember even as they’re happening. He’s sure, later, they were full of staring out of windows and listening to grossly morose music, then flicking it off in a fit of pique and dancing in the kitchen only to find moving made him feel hollow and molten like newly-blown glass.

*

On a snowy Tuesday Colin meets someone. He’s not looking, particularly, and maybe that’s how he falls into it, like a pothole hidden by the curve of the road. One moment he’s half-heartedly flirting with a guy who’s taking his photo – not knowing if he’s playing for the camera or the person behind it – then they’re small-talking about the snow as an excuse not to say goodbye, and then he has the guy’s number. Ten minutes later Colin’s around the corner with snowflakes damp on his lashes, actually calling and making something that sounds remarkably like a proposition, powered by the thought he can’t stay stuck in a moment which never quite happened with Bradley forever.

The guy jogs – actually fucking _jogs_ – to meet him. He’s older, grey hair all sticky-up and artistic, and from underneath it he looks at Colin like he’s fascinating and unexpected. Colin can’t think what to say to or about the vaguely predatory look in his eyes, but he likes it, being the thing someone like him wants to chase. He grabs the guy by his collar and leads him back to his flat, and they kiss, harsh and brief just for the sake of having done it first before they pull each other out of their clothes. The snow beyond the window adds romance to it: he’s not fucking a virtual stranger against his coat rack just to get out of his own head; look, outside it’s snowing, and they’ll catch the prettiness of it if only they stick out their tongues.

He doesn’t expect things to last with the guy; he doesn’t mind when they do.

*

One day, spurred by an advert about spring and clean starts, Colin gets a new phone. He’s transferring his contacts and he deletes Bradley’s number on a whim. He tells himself something about drawing a line in the sand; ignores the pang of regret and the way his fingers twitch to snatch the number back from the ether and clutch it to his chest.

*

In the year which follows he sometimes thinks he sees Bradley in the street or on the Tube or in the popcorn queue at the cinema, and he never can quite tell if the pick-up in his heartbeat is fear that it is him, or anger that it isn’t. Sometimes he rehearses a meeting in his head just in case. He’ll be breezy, pleased, smile just the right fond, friendly smile, hug Bradley lightly and tell him: _good to see you, lost your number, how’s it going?_

Tonight he sees four different Bradleys on his way to the theatre, and curses the universe for being so full of people with exactly the same hair and shaped head. In his dressing room he looks at himself in the mirror and wishes he still had some idea where Bradley lived and what the pathways of his life are so he could stay out of his way.

Two hours later he’s in the middle of the third act of an absurdist play about love and god and the universe. He’s supposed to be contemplating an orange as it encompasses the way people invest in symbols, but the only thing he can think as he stares at its pitted skin is: _why am I even thinking about avoiding some guy I used to work with? Why am I thinking about him at all?_

He almost fluffs his line, but it doesn’t really matter; the orange is upstaging him, anyway.

*

‘The good thing about thirty,’ Stephanie says, voice all weird like she’s holding the phone between her chin and her shoulder, ‘is that it opens up a whole array of new roles. Mailed you a couple of things and my thoughts. Let me know yours by close of play. No pun intended hahaha.’

Colin winces. Partly it’s his birthday hangover still loitering under his fringe. Mostly it’s that Stephanie’s a shit hot agent but the way she never laughs and just says _hahaha_ in a tone a bit like a donkey bray when she’s amused never gets less disconcerting. He hangs up and opens his laptop, sips at a nearly-cold tea while he waits for his email to go boldly.

An hour later he’s at the bookcase looking for his copy of _Richard III_. He drags it off the shelf and Michael comes over and drops his head onto Colin’s shoulder to see what he’s doing.

‘Shakespeare?’ he says.

‘Maybe. If they like me. It’s in Stratford – that new theatre they’ve built? Supposed to be amazing acoustics and I’ve never done one in the round, so – ’

‘Better get swotting, then,’ Michael says, and pats Colin on the arse as he goes into his study to do whatever the hell it is he does in there which necessitates a closed door and an extra wall of Bach for good measure.

Colin settles in front of the window on an impeccably chosen wingback armchair in the same dull grey as the curtains. He thumbs the corner of the page but his mind wanders – dregs of his hangover, maybe, getting in the way. Snow whirls on the air in a dance and he looks from it to _now is the winter of our discontent_ and feels an aching affinity with the words. 

On paper he has everything he ever wanted: his epitaph-slash-CV is brimming with enough accolades and high notes to make any obituary writer come in his pants; he has a live-in lover – a photographer, no less – who chooses impeccable furniture and sucks his cock with a kind of indignant perfectionism; on the shelf there’s a picture of his family grinning at some award thing, a little smug that they produced him. And yes, there are members of his extended who aren’t thrilled he has a live-in lover called Michael when they’d prefer he’d married a nice girl called Marie who produced two well-behaved children and then spent the rest of her life with her knees pinched together, but that’s hardly enough to explain the hollowness below his navel and the fact that sometimes he wants to screw his life into a ball, throw it away, and start again. 

A line over the page jumps out at him and wedges in his head:

> _I, in this weak piping time of peace,  
>  Have no delight to pass away the time_

Ain’t that the truth. His life is nothing but peace and he has no delight at passing away the time, or anything, really. _Christ, identifying with Richard III_ , Colin thinks. _I may officially be fucked_.

He tells Stephanie he’s going to audition with the opening soliloquy, and she tells him not to because that’s what everybody does. He offers her some acting flim-flam, and when it comes to it he pours everything he feels into the lines and makes tears spring in the director’s eyes. They’re luvvy tears but they still count.

On the Tube on the way home Colin wonders if all of his malaise is just some kind of turning thirty crisis, and he hates himself a little bit for being the kind of guy who takes stock and sees only the intangible negative spaces of the life he didn’t grasp. _It’ll pass_ , he thinks. 

As they pull into London Bridge a blonde guy gets on – way too young to actually be Bradley but enough of a reminder of his general shape that Colin remembers having a similar sort of freak-out on a train years ago. They were in France – just the two of them wasting a day off – too deep in conversation to notice their stop until a slew of people swarmed on, blocking the aisle. Colin panicked about missing their chance to get off – every French phrase he’d ever known flew from his head, and he ended up flapping his arms and saying, ‘shoo, shoo’ into startled then disgruntled French faces.

On the platform, Bradley turned to him, and barely able to speak for buttoning up a laugh he said: 

‘You do know, don’t you Colin, that chou in French is cabbage?’

Colin curled into a mortified little knot, muttering: 

‘How could you let me, how could you let me shout _cabbage cabbage_ at strangers?’

And Bradley laughed until his eyes were mostly tears, and in the back of the cab to wherever they’d been heading Colin rested his forehead on Bradley’s shoulder and poured out jokes that weren’t really jokes about when, when would he be old enough that he’d stop doing stupid things and always know exactly what to do?

The train rattles on. Colin puts his hand on his own knee where Bradley’s once was, scratching a memory of the words _never, Colin, I hope_ into the threads.

*

Colin gets the part. He goes out for dinner with Michael to celebrate, and spends most of the night on his own because Michael’s got an exhibition opening and therefore needs to take a dozen calls before they even get to the main course.

Colin plays with the candle, pushing in the warm malleable cave around the flame until he breaks the wall it’s created and sticks hot wax to his thumb. It hurts but he leaves it until the wax sets, peels it off to reveal a small, reddened swell. _Probably blister_ , he thinks, with worrying disconnection from his own hand, and he pokes at the pool of molten wax near the wick with his littlest digit, just to see how long he can stand the burn.

When they get home they kiss outside the bathroom, toothpastey and familiar. Michael’s phone goes again and he says goodnight with a _sorry, darling, I have to take this_ , even though ‘darling’ is what Michael calls his assistant and Colin’s hinted a million times that he’d really rather just be Colin if he has to be called anything at all.

*

He packs for Stratford. He’s pretty good at leaving, knows all the things he needs and how to most ergonomically arrange them, and on the train he listens to a song he liked when he was sixteen over and over and over, trying to remind himself why and how he got here.

*

The theatre is beautiful. The seats sweep elegantly out from a small, round dais in the middle. The director – Trevor, call me Trev and lose a limb – coos about the intimacy and how the scant set will serve to highlight the realpolitik, and Colin talks about how creepy the ghosts are and they get on famously. Or so Trevor says later to everyone in the pub.

A short way into rehearsals Trevor pulls Colin to one side, peers at him over the top of his little square glasses and tells him his daughter Emily’s a documentary film maker, just out of film school. For a horrible second Colin thinks he’s trying to set them up, and actually he’s relieved when Trevor says she wants to make a film about the theatre and the re-opening. _I suspect you’re just the lynchpin she needs_ , Trevor says, and adds something about helping out a fellow thesp and really she just needs some interviews and shots of him rehearsing and maybe if it wouldn’t be a bother she could follow him around Shakespeare’s house _or something_. Colin says yes because – well, he can’t think of a reason not to, and a week later he’s got a camera in his face and a perky twenty-two year old asking him his opinion on whether Richard III is really just misunderstood. A bunch of American tourists trap him in the gift shop and ask for his autograph because he’s being followed by a camera crew, and by the time Colin crawls back to his room through a quagmire of false smiles and forced shallow conversation all he’s in the mood for is staring at the ceiling. 

His phone goes and it’s Michael. He thinks about not answering but does, and then wishes he hadn’t because he doesn’t have the energy to fake being chipper and he’s not at all in the mood to explain why. The conversation disintegrates into terse pauses and _well – yeah, well – I’ll say goodnight, then_ , and as soon as it’s over Colin thinks he should call back and apologise, although he’s not sure for what.

Something Emily said while skipping through Shakespeare’s bedroom washes over him: _really Richard III is a bit existentialist, isn’t he?_ At the time he’d thought, _no, no he’s not. I think you mean fatalist_ , but he hadn’t said anything, unsure he understood existentialism enough to explain it. Existentialist. Whatever the word means it’s a good one for this feeling where existence is just a bit of a bind, and fucking old Dickie Gloucester got that all right.

*

On opening night they celebrate in the oldest pub in Stratford. Or one of the ones that claims to be, anyway – Colin’s counted four so far. Emily gets tipsy on some bottled vodka thing the colour of sickly weasels, and catches his arm at the bar. She leans on a wood-worm nibbled dark beam, and tells him very earnestly what a big _Merlin_ fan she was and lists her favourite scenes. They’re all his and Colin says thanks and listens while she gabs, lightly disconcerted by the way she keeps stroking his wrist and giggling at everything he says. She leaves a pause and he can’t remember at all what she was saying, so for fear he was being deplorably ungracious he trots out a few anecdotes, the better ones he never usually shares or even pokes at inside his own head for fear of what might burst out with them. Emily grins and asks if he’s still friends with Bradley, and Colin knows what she wants to hear so he says it:

‘Yeah, we see each other occasionally.’

She giddies at the thought he might come to the play, and Colin makes some excuse and buys her another drink, wondering if he lied for her or if it’s the kind a person tells because they wish it were the truth. She fires more questions at him – _what was it like filming that bit where - ? Did you really hate those video diary things?_ – and it’s easy enough to slip into the past, as long as he keeps beer on his tongue to buoy up his smile. Someone bumps Emily from behind, and she collides with him, tuts but stays where she is – closer – pushing her tits into his chest. Colin tries to find a subtle way to shoehorn the word _boyfriend_ into the conversation, but he’s too beer-buoyed to pull off subtle and ends up just pointing at the speaker where a tune he’s never heard before is playing and blurting out:

‘My boyfriend Michael really loves this record.’

Emily frowns, tilts her head very deliberately, and with the guileless, disconnected directness of any lush she says:

‘What kind of wanker is he?’

‘What?’

‘Opening night. Ask me, if he was any kind of not wanker he’d be here. That’s what supportive boyfriends do for their adorbibble boyfriends.’ 

Colin mounts a defence about him being very busy and how they don’t live in each other’s pockets, gives up halfway through because Michael’s never actually made it to one of his plays, and now he comes to think about it, that is a bit of a wanker thing to do. Or not do. He buys them both a whiskey. And then Emily buys him one back, and they get another two for good measure because shit, they’re already drunk so they need to order them now before they’re too drunk to get served.

Somehow they end up in the beer garden. There’s frost on the picnic tables and the air hangs frigid in Colin’s lungs, but Emily offers him a flattened spliff and Colin takes it because he’d quite like to warm up enough to pass out. They chat – or more precisely, talk in tandem about film school and drama school – and when they walk back to the hotel he kisses her – not even really enough to count – just because she’s there and apparently he’s a lonely existentialist who doesn’t really understand existentialism and he has a wanker boyfriend and didn’t notice.

*

The play’s run lasts three months. By the end of it Colin’s sick of the Avon and all the Shakespeare puns on the shop signs that he used to find charming and quaint. As a parting gesture on his way to the station he rants about who the fuck would call their jewellery shop Iago’s: _buy a thin gold chain from Iago’s – perfect for strangling your new bride in her sleep._

On Colin’s first night back in London Michael’s out, and because he really is a wanker he’s left nothing in the fridge but a steak in a bloody carrier bag and some kind of film labelled, _For Battersea_. Colin calls Stephanie and talks her into having him over to perform a verbal autopsy on his career. They get a bit pissed just because they get on better with a bottle of wine inside them and being tipsy stops Colin wincing when she does her weird not-laugh thing. Her husband shoos them out when she lights up a cigarette, and they sit on the back step with a bottle of Rioja like they’re kids but with a very good wine cellar to steal from. Between cigarettes she thumbs her lip and talks about a film charting the struggles of a poet during the potato famine. She’s heard whispers it might need a recast because the bright young Irish lead got himself in over his head with coke and might need to go on _gardening leave_. Halfway through telling Colin the plot she clicks her fingers and points at him with both hands:

‘Know what I meant to say. That documentary thingywhatsit – guess who’s doing the voice over.’ 

‘Barney the Dinosaur? Darth Vader? Heeeehhuur, heeehurrr, the force is strong in Stratford.’

Stephanie gives him a look from beneath her fringe which says she’s picturing his testicles in a jar of vinegar.

‘No. Your old mucker.’

‘My old – ?’

‘Bradley. Bradley James. That Emily – she’s a firecracker – tracked him down through his cousin’s sister’s rabbit sitter or something and talked him into it. Fair dues, good angle, Merlin and Arthur reunited. Almost like that once and future whatnot bullshit. Except neither of you died, _obv_ , unless you were very quiet about it.’

Colin sips his wine. It fogs tasteless on his tongue and he can hear it, marketing people: _oh gosh that’s a USP and a half, isn’t it? We can totes spin that for column inches and a better slot on More 4._

‘Great,’ he says. 

Colin tops his glass up, scratches at his forehead, telling himself it is great, because isn’t he always thinking how stupid he was to delete Bradley’s number and how needless it all was? His heart disagrees. He tries to quiet it: _it’s just a voice over, heart, they’ll shove Bradley in a studio in Soho or somewhere and he’ll lilt his way through a shitty script and precisely four people will notice and make the connection. It’ll barely be a footnote somewhere in the bowels of Wikipedia._

‘...screening in your diary, then?’

‘What?’

‘Film festival, photo op, yada yada, networking ahoy – especially if you fancy the potato poet film.’

‘Um – yeah. If I’m free.’

‘Super. You are.’ 

‘And he’ll – he’ll be there, will he? Bradley?’

‘Of course. Photo op, yada yada, pay attention. You’ll have plenty of time to cosy up.’

 _Fuck_.

‘Great,’ Colin says. ‘I’ll look forward to it. Er – you mind if I open another bottle?’

*

On the Tube Colin hums the same note as the rattle of the vent behind his head. He tells himself Bradley’s probably forgotten all about him and the stupid beach, weaves a convincing life story for him in his head: _Bradley has a real house, and a wife, and a labrador, and cats – cats who hate the labrador and each other and probably Bradley too for good measure._ He can almost see it, and he can’t tell at all if he hopes it’s the truth or not.

When Colin gets in, Michael’s back. He sneaks in from the side and catches Colin off-guard with a kiss – the open, searching kind, keeps him mouth prisoner by tilting his head. Colin bats him off, hopes he’s convincingly cute enough about it to hide his irritation, and goes into the kitchen, forgets why he’s there, and stares at the cupboards with wine shadows in front of his eyes. 

‘What stole you away this evening?’ Michael says.

‘Steph. She wanted to plot. You know how she is.’

‘And what does she have plotted for you this time?’

‘Film about the potato famine, maybe.’

‘Sounds – depressing.’

‘I hear it’s a rot a minute.’

Michael smiles and reaches for him, gentle as he tugs on his belt loops, incongruously making Colin’s irritation flare red hot and vicious at the base of his throat. What he needs is to forget about Bradley, for Michael to be who he used to be: the guy who catches him around the waist and pins him to the wall and nips at the back of his neck while he fucks every single thought right out of his head. But Michael hasn’t been that in so long Colin can’t even really remember what it felt like to want him. He wonders if it’s because this is all so domestic – maybe if they went away somewhere exotic like South America – they could go to Angel Falls and talk about how prehistoric and lush everything looks. Colin’s enthusiasm fades as soon as it flickers. He sees himself say something about watching out for pterodactyls and Michael reply: _dinosaurs are extinct, darling. You did actually go to school, one presumes?_

‘Come to bed.’

Michael kisses his shoulder, and Colin thinks something uncharitable about him being less good-looking than he remembered as payback for him being a wanker. He goes with him anyway, and watches with a sort of calm disinterest as Michael noses a line down his stomach. He pretends he’s just enjoying being seduced or whatever, but honestly he can’t be bothered to touch him, and fine he’ll take the chance to get off but that’s the extent of his investment, here. Maybe it always was.

He’s glad, in the morning, when Michael says he’ll be away the rest of the week.

Colin roams around the place, messing up the furniture, and at night, inside his eyelids he practices all the things he’ll say to Bradley, the little stories he’ll tell, the way he’ll make believe a nice life for himself to keep the truth safely locked away behind it.

*

The cinema’s a tiny place and everyone congregated is there for the screening, but they’ve velvet roped an area off, anyway. Colin says hi to Trevor and kisses Emily on the cheek with a quick grimace at the memory of her tongue in his mouth, says all the right things about _congratulations_ and _isn’t this grand and thanks for inviting even though secretly he’s thinking: I think you might have ruined my life. I haven’t slept in two weeks and every time my boyfriend touches me I flinch. And yes, he might actually be a wanker, but that’s beside the point because until I noticed I was all right with it_. Luckily there’s free wine, and he swipes one and drinks it as quickly as is seemly and loiters by a table of Pringles and roasted nuts on plates.

A couple of people come over and say hello, and they exchange career flotsam for a while – _what are you working on? Oh, a poet in the potato famine? Good-oh_ – and someone mentions some trivia about the cinema being built in 1930 and what an awesome example of Deco architecture. Colin trots _that_ out to the next five people he speaks to because his brain’s too busy looking for Bradley while trying to make it seem like he’s doing nothing of the sort to really take part in conversation. Through a couple of suited shoulders Colin sees him, unhooking the rope and letting himself in, pulling some sheepish face even though no-one’s looking. Colin ducks behind a pillar – god bless the Deco architects for that – and watches as Bradley introduces himself and shakes hands with a couple of the suits. 

He looks different, although Colin’s not sure to what, only realising as he thinks it that he’d made a picture of Bradley in his head to compare the real thing to. He’s wearing a suit – dark grey and a bit proper, softened with a red tie which complements his face – and his hair is longer and in his eyes and not quite so blonde as Colin remembered. Colin’s breath stumbles anyway because he’d forgotten how exquisite Bradley’s smile is and quite how guilelessly he uses it between laughs. He swipes another wine and tells himself a bunch of clichés – pull yourself together, just go and say hello, get it over and done with – does the thing he used to do before auditions, visualising it going perfectly – a conversation light as the breeze that wafts away the years. Doesn’t really work: acting he knows how to do but people have never really been his forte; Bradley even less so than everyone else because he’s always so much more than merely a person. Colin drinks half his wine, takes a deep breath, and goes over – mostly because he doesn’t want Bradley to catch sight of him necking wine behind a pillar like some kind of nervy alcoholic troglodyte.

‘Hey.’

‘Colin!’

Bradley’s eyes illuminate as he turns, and he holds out his hand. Colin takes it with the wrong one because he’s still clutching the wineglass and they both laugh and do an awkward sort of shoulder bump not-hug _thing_. Then Colin laughs again – too loud and nervous – because for some reason his gaze has strayed to Bradley’s other hand looking for a wedding ring and there isn’t one and the air’s too hot and tight inside his collar and laughter is the only noise which covers that. 

‘So – ’

‘This is – ’

‘Sorry, you go – ’

‘No, you, I hadn’t – ’ 

‘It’s – ’

A bell rings, and for a second Colin thinks it’s some kind of divine intervention from the god of hopeless, awkward conversations, but then an usher in a cheap nylon imitation of a tuxedo steps out and announces: _ladies and gentleman please take your seats, the screening is about to start_. Bradley gestures for them to go in together and Colin swallows but nods because he can’t see a way to get out of it. 

Steps lead them down to a middle row, and they select a pair of mustard-coloured velvet seats studded with stains of dubious origin. 

‘Built in 1930, apparently,’ Colin says, and waves at the roof and the cornicing around the screen, which looks like the set from a Cinderella panto set in a prison. 

‘And apparently they haven’t cleaned it since,’ Bradley mutters, dusting the armrest theatrically.

Colin rests his wineglass on his knee, fingering the stem. He glances, trying to take in all the details of Bradley’s face without actually looking at him, only gets as far as a quick skim of his ear and his eyelashes before Bradley catches his gaze.

‘Voice-overs, then?’ Colin says. ‘You do them as David Bowie, or – ?’

‘Call for my David Bowie impression has been shamefully scant, but – I like doing them. Fits with my schedule.’

‘And what’s that, these days?’

‘When I’m not doing that, stay-at-home dad would I think be the term.’

‘Wow, you – ’ Colin swallows. ‘ – you made a human?’

‘Half of one.’

‘And you – you look after them?’

‘Hard to believe, isn’t it?’

_Not especially, actually. You always did like kids._

Bradley reaches into his pocket, and pulls out his wallet. He flips it open, and in the little plastic slot Colin keeps his Oyster card in there’s a picture of Bradley and a blonde girl making stupid faces at the camera. 

‘That is my daughter,’ Bradley says, very precise and soft and maybe a bit proud, and Colin nods while his heart goes _thunk thunk thunk_ at three times its usual rate. He scans the background of the picture for a couple of pissed-off cats called Barry and Twizzle and the labrador – who’ll have a stupid name like Moppit that Bradley will only have realised was stupid the first time he said, _stop it Moppit, drop it Moppit_ – but all he can make out is a vague haze of quite ordinary lounge.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Chloe.’

‘She looks like you.’

‘For her sins.’

‘No, she’s gorgeous.’

Bradley smiles and tucks her away again. He leans in a little, and murmurs:

‘Yes, she is, but I can’t say so because that’d be annoying and egotistical.’

Colin hums amusement, and finishes his wine, then immediately regrets doing so because now he has nothing to do with his mouth but talk.

‘I guess you’ve a wife to go with her, then?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Chloe was – well, best mistake I ever made. Didn’t work out with her mum, but luckily we realised before we got the part with the rings and the altar and the crushing devastation. We’re – friendly, get on better apart, I think.’

‘Sometimes it’s like that, I guess.’

‘You?’

Bradley lifts an eyebrow, and there’s something hopeful in his eyes which makes Colin want to dodge the truth and say _no, there’s no-one_ just to see what might happen.

‘I live with someone,’ he says. ‘I don’t have a picture in my wallet, or anything.’

It occurs to him in a rush that maybe he should, that maybe he should at least have his live-in-lover as the wallpaper on his phone, something he can get out as demonstrable proof he has a life.

‘Been together long?’

‘Not really. Couple of years. Three, actually. Three and a half now I think.’ Bradley laughs, hides it with a duck of his head. ‘What?’

‘That’s ages in normal human years, Colin.’

‘We’re both really busy, though. If you add up the time we’ve actually spent together we’ve barely met.’

Bradley laughs again, and Colin’s glad, even though he’s not sure why he’s downplaying it, why he’s on the verge of a lie and a joke which isn’t really either but starts: _I only moved into his because I’d forget who he is, otherwise._

‘Is he coming?’ Bradley says, and looks back at the rows of chairs.

‘No, no he’s not.’

Colin presses his lips together to keep himself from saying: _he’s usually a wanker and doesn’t bother, but I didn’t want to take the chance tonight he’d break the habit so I didn’t actually invite him. He thinks I’m out with friends he doesn’t know. Which is sort of the truth, really, if you squint._

The lights dim, and as the film starts, Bradley leans in and whispers: 

‘It’s really nice to see you, Col.’

*

Colin misses most of the film. In the dark he inches his elbow across the armrest to Bradley’s and leaves it there, like it proves something if they can touch for one, five, ten, twenty, thirty minutes, after all this time. His head floods with his erratic heartbeat, like the whole universe has collapsed and there’s only elbow-suit-suit-elbow left binding everything together.

Halfway through – while Colin on screen is in Shakespeare’s house joking about how these days Richard III would be thrashing out his issues on reality TV – Bradley’s knee nudges his. Colin glances at him, watches Bradley smile at what he’s saying on the film, the look on his face rather rapt. Colin tells himself it doesn’t mean anything – and neither does the knee, beyond small seats and a residual nugget of comfort in each other’s space borne of so many late nights and lounging on the grass in France cut off from everyone by their inability to parle Francais. His heart doesn’t quite believe it, and Colin keeps his breath tight, like pinching it all in will stop Bradley from noticing he’s there and moving away. 

After the credits roll they stand close, trying to navigate the arrangement of space between them for the pictures. Bradley drapes an arm around Colin, warm and heavy, and it’s easy enough to lean in and ignore the way his heart bounces like a puppy against his ribs at the thought that Bradley smells exactly the same as he used to, like sheets on a clothes line rippling in a summer breeze. The photographer cracks an appalling joke to make them both laugh, and Bradley’s palm just tightens, squeezing Colin’s shoulder where no-one can see.

With flash-ghosts in their eyes they do a round of the room, Stephanie – who appeared from nowhere with a dozen opinions about the film, none of them her own – leading and shovelling snippets of what might be good to ask to the handful of journos and bloggers. Colin does his bit, reminded of weddings, like he and Bradley have teamed up against a phalanx of relatives armed with impertinent questions, fending off the worst and sharing little side-eye glances that say: _why the fuck are we here and why won’t they just let us alone so we can go to the buffet?_

Once they’re free of their obligations they get a drink at the small, impersonal cinema bar, and Colin thinks maybe uneasiness will descend, but instead of mining the past Bradley loosens his tie and undoes his top button.

‘I always fancied Richard III,’ he says.

‘Well, that’s – I can’t say he’s my type, but if a hunchback turns you on I’m not judging.’

‘You know what I – ’ 

Bradley trails off into a little huff of a laugh, wets his lips and looks down, firing a shot of longing through Colin’s stomach. Up close he hasn’t changed much: a new dusting of crinkles around his eyes, maybe, and something older about his smile. Colin’s gaze drifts to the opening of Bradley’s collar, and he imagines nudging his nose into the gap between cotton and neck, breathing in that glimpse of skin. He pictures desire making Bradley too hot inside, fidgeting himself into sunshine and sheets and sweat as Colin bites _just there_. He purposefully meets Bradley’s eye again, but can’t help taking a tiny nibble of his own lip, distracting himself so he doesn’t lean in.

‘After _Merlin_ – I was surprised when you never showed up starring in something else,’ Colin says.

Colin lifts his drink, hiding behind the bottle a rapid-fire uncertainty about why the hell he just admitted that. He wonders if it shows on his face, how many times he sat in front of his laptop with the curser daring him to type in _Bradley James_ , how he never had the balls to do it and just imagined him a perfect life instead.

‘Right thing never came along,’ Bradley says, and Colin can’t tell if he’s sad about it, or relieved. ‘Might go back to it one day, but for now, anytime I want I can make a castle out of sofa cushions and prance about with a cucumber for a sword and pretend it’s to keep Chloe amused. Nothing like a captive audience.’

‘She must think you’re the best dad ever.’

‘We’ll see if she still thinks that when she’s sixteen and I’m threatening prospective suitors with a mace I whittled myself out of a butternut squash,’ Bradley says, and Colin laughs.

Emily bounces over, grinning at them like she’s six and it’s her birthday. Bradley pulls her into a hug, buys her a drink, and makes jokes about her film which aren’t really jokes and have this warm inclusiveness leaking out the sides. She asks if she can get a picture with them both – the unofficial fun sort with her phone, and Bradley takes over and laughs at himself as it takes him fourteen tries to get all three of them squashed into the frame. Colin thinks: _I’d forgotten how you do that, how you never mind giving yourself away or playing the fool, how easy you make being around you feel. I liked that. I really liked that. I still do, apparently._

Too quickly they’re outside, and actually causing a bit of an obstruction as they loiter on the threshold of the cinema while the good citizens of London try and get into a pub for a final swift pint. Bradley checks his watch.

‘Shit, is that the time? I’ve got to go.’

‘You turn into a pumpkin at midnight these days?’

‘Worse – babysitter turns into The Hulk and smashes my bank balance,’ Bradley says.

He glances down the road towards the car park, and Colin thinks of watching him walk off and merge into the crowd, of all the times he thought he saw Bradley and didn’t know whether to turn away or run over, how he longed to hear Bradley shout him through the throng and force his hand. His stomach knots with wanting Bradley to say something about seeing each other again, catching up properly, but he doesn’t, just gestures with his thumb that he’s off.

Colin lets him take two steps – backwards – and then panic rips like a pyrotechnic in his lungs.

‘Can I – can I get your number again?’ Colin says. ‘Sorry I lost it. Me and technology, it’s – ’

‘Yeah, sure.’

Bradley takes Colin’s phone as he offers it, types his number in.

‘I really liked your voice over, by the way,’ Colin says, needlessly pulling at a thread on his sleeve. ‘But – I mean you always did have that way of talking where you – you know – you have a lot of energy when you talk and it’s – infectious.’

‘Do I need to tell you you were brilliant?’ Bradley says, and hands him his phone back with the lightest brush of fingers. 

‘Maybe if the acting thing doesn’t work out I can be a tour guide in Stratford.’

‘I meant in the play. I wish I’d seen it, you know, live. I saw the reviews – it’s not everyone who moves that guy from _The Guardian_ to the word _electric_.’

‘I think he just meant there’s something of the light bulb about me.’

‘That’s not going to fly. I watched the rehearsal footage and Emily talked me half to death about you and how very in the moment you were in every moment.’

Colin bites his lip, pulse jumping in his throat. He never quite got used to it, the way Bradley calls him brilliant and actually seems to mean it, nor understood why it’s that which makes him feel like blushing far more than the elegant sentences Stephanie tells him some of the critics have penned.

‘Can I call you?’ Colin says, and the air turns to soup, like he can’t breathe it in, he has to bite it and swallow it in chunks.

‘Wouldn’t have given you my number if I had any objection to that.’ 

‘You could’ve given me a fake one.’

‘I didn’t,’ Bradley says. The moment rolls like a choppy sea, and then Bradley squints an apology, and checks his watch again. ‘I’m sorry – I really do have to go. Babysitter, it’s – ’

‘Yeah – me too. Only not with the babysitter part because I – I don’t have one of those.’

‘Was really good to see you again.’

Bradley smiles, lopsided and small, and then he’s gone, and Colin stands there – in everyone’s way – feeling like the sun just went out.

*

On the Tube Colin sits with his phone in his lap. He stares at Bradley’s number until he can see it with his eyes closed, so he can’t delete it this time because it’s written in his head.

He doesn’t mention Bradley to Michael – not when he gets in, and not over breakfast the next day. He couches it as _Michael wouldn’t be interested, god they’d hate each other, Michael doesn’t care about some friend from my past_ , like it’s benevolence and not the selfish impulse to have something only his to disappear inside. He pictures himself telling Bradley something Trevor said about Richard III owing most of his public perception to Russ Abbott, and them making a list of all the historical figures who’ve been screwed by comedy: Elizabeth I on Blackadder; everyone from the Spanish Inquisition – 

‘See you when I get back, then?’

‘What?’

Colin looks up, and Michael kisses the top of his head and mutters something about him being a dreamer. With the familiar sound of luggage casters on wood, he’s gone. 

Colin gives it an hour in case Michael’s forgotten something and comes back, and then he’s pacing by the window, nerves tangling his stomach, his hand balled and sweaty around his phone. He screws his eyes shut, and listens to the mechanical _bring bring bring_ , telling himself to relax, it’s just a phone call. With a click Bradley answers – manages a faint _he-umph_ before someone in the background giggles up a storm over a violently cheerful theme tune. 

‘Hey,’ Colin says. ‘It’s Colin. Er – is this – is this a bad time? I’ll call back, it’s – ’

‘Nah, it’s fine. We’re just watching a cartoon with space pigs.’

Bradley’s tone goes up like he’s making a face – sounds muffled. Colin pictures him on the sofa with a girl who looks just like him in his lap, grinning nose to nose.

‘Space pigs?’ 

‘Educational hogs, allegedly – but they have these stupid inflated heads like helmets and they don’t walk, they float – flipping _float_ – and all the stys look like rockets. Frankly it’s ridiculous to claim they’re supposed to be anything other than porkmanauts.’ Bradley pauses and then adds: ‘And I _probably_ should have lied and said I’m doing something cool and not watching kids’ TV in the middle of the day, but in my defence we had a hectic morning – I got head-butted somewhere evolution only intended to be treated gently at playgroup and Chloe laughed so hard she threw up a bit.’

Colin laughs more than it deserves just in sheer relief they’re talking, and Bradley laughs too and says:

‘What you up to?’

‘Um – precisely nothing. I got a script for this film – potato famine poet thing – short notice but it’s right up my street. I’m waiting to hear if they’re interested in seeing me, so – fingers crossed, I guess.’

‘Like that’s necessary. When was the last time you didn’t get something you wanted?’

‘Acting-wise? Been a while, I suppose.’

‘Otherwise?’

‘All the time. All the fucking time.’

As the words fall from his mouth Colin’s not sure how they got from space pigs to here, and disconcerted by a sudden assault of truth he climbs onto the sofa and lies flat, listening to Bradley breathe and his daughter chunter happy little nothings to him. 

‘So – I – I was going to ask, I have these tickets to _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_ – ’

‘Oh, the Hamlet thing?’

‘Yeah. It’s a new production – supposed to be really great – person I was going with can’t make it – I don’t know how you’re fixed for, like, Chloe – ’ 

It feels odd to say her name, like he’s appropriating her somehow, but Bradley asks when it is and says he’s never seen the play before but he always wanted to so _yeah, yeah Col, that’d be great. I’ll work something out_. They make a rough plan and Colin hangs up, but he doesn’t get up, and after five minutes of staring at the ceiling he texts Bradley to ask what channel the space pigs are on. Bradley texts him the number and Colin grabs the remote and turns on the TV.

>   
>  **Bradley:**  
>  See? SPACE PIGS! That one there? The one with the space boots? Guess what his name is?
> 
> **Colin:**  
>  …?
> 
> **Bradley:**  
>  PORKCHOP and he lives with APPLESAUCE
> 
> **Colin:**  
>  That’s grotesque.
> 
> **Bradley:**  
>  This is the best bit. Look how he needlessly slips in an allegory about homework!
> 
> **Colin:**  
>  How many times have you seen this? 
> 
> **Bradley:**  
>  Dozens, mate, but honestly you see something new each time.

*

They meet in the bar before the play, and fall into a continuance of a discussion they had at lunchtime about Porkchop and his obvious crush on the farmer-slash-godlike-figure. Colin calls Bradley a philistine for not being able to see the clear allegory of the story of Isaiah in the second series, and Bradley says: _whatever, Colin, I may be a philistine but I bet you can’t name a record in the top 40 or a single player in any international football team_. Colin tries – he scratches around for a good few minutes for the name of that South American player he’s sure he saw on the news. In the end he guesses a vague approximation – Benildihnio – and Bradley laughs and says it sounds like either a cough medicine or a disease of the bowels.

‘Or it’s a bowel disease you get from too much cough medicine,’ Colin says.

‘That’s it. That’s exactly what Benildihnio is.’

They giggle like they’re drunk on a pint each and fall into the theatre. Bradley misses the step and nearly ends up in the lap of a woman sporting a very pointy nose and actual pearls to clutch, and they shush each other, swatting chastisement and sniggering when they can’t quite make quiet take. The lights go out and they sink onto each other’s shoulders and stay squashed, a knot of knees and jostled elbows, Colin’s skin softly hot and prickled everywhere they’re touching in the dark.

It’s a noisy production, and halfway through the act Colin takes the chance to lean into Bradley’s arm and whisper:

‘The barrels – that’s a unique acting challenge, with the limited scope for visual cues.’

‘Not unique – what about people at Disney World?’

‘You’re actually comparing playing Donald Duck in a theme park to one of the great absurdist comedies?’

‘Yes.’ 

‘Philistine.’

Bradley’s eyes glimmer, amused, and he inches in closer.

‘Did I ever tell you,’ Bradley mouths, ‘about the first time I took a girl to the theatre?’

‘If there’s exhibitionist aisle sex I don’t want to hear.’

Bradley backs up, raises an eyebrow: _how is that where your mind went?_ And Colin lifts his back in an, _I don’t know, I really don’t know, but don’t say you wouldn’t because we both know you’d be lying_.

‘End of act two,’ Bradley whispers, shooting a vaguely guilty look at the stage, and Colin tries to concentrate on his words and not just the waft of breath on his earlobe, ‘we go out to get a drink and I’m rambling about _oh didn’t they do interesting things with the fourth wall_ – trying to sound like I’m cultured so she’ll sleep with me.’ Colin tries to listen to the words, smiles because he thinks that’s the correct response, and leans a little closer like he can’t quite hear, wanting Bradley’s lips just to brush at his ear. ‘This girl looks at me, and dead straight she says, _I didn’t get the ending. Felt really – what’s the word – unresolved_. And I’m like, _that’s probably because this is the interval_ – ’ There. Colin gets what he wants, the lightest touch of skin on skin, and it hits like a jolt, makes him pull in his stomach. ‘ – and then I’m trying to take back the _you moron_ face I accidentally made, all _yeah, easy mistake to make_ but she still cried. I bought her a Cornetto to smooth it over but she still didn’t sleep with me.’

Bradley leans away, and Colin sniggers, having lost the thread of the anecdote but knowing he should, his heart booming like a sound effect on stage.

*

‘So – er – ’

They’re hovering on another pavement, in the way of everyone and standing at once too close and not nearly as close as Colin wants. All the things he could say sound impossibly date-like: this was fun; I’ll call you next week; thanks for coming. He shifts from foot to foot, and under Bradley’s lashes there’s the vague echo of the way he used to look at Colin before the conversation on the beach: this bottomless and undeserved fondness. What Colin used to do with that look was pretend he didn’t know what it meant, think: _that’s just Bradley. He looks at everyone like that_. Gave him the freedom to go further than he would have with his flirting, prolonging the twitch and the tingle of possibility, allowing himself _maybe_ dreams to wrap himself in to help him sleep. Now he’s not at all sure what he’s doing with the look, only that in the space of a handful of heartbeats he’s saying:

‘You want to come back to mine for a bit, or do you have to get on?’

‘Chloe’s with her mum, so I – sure.’

On the Tube they stand even though there are seats, and Colin presses the toe of his trainer just over Bradley’s, pretends he hasn’t noticed they’re touching. He readjusts his grip on the post they’re both clinging to until his knuckles brush the front of Bradley’s t shirt, waiting for enough of a jolt from the track to let him feel what’s underneath. When one doesn’t come, he lets his gaze rove the swells and dips of the muscles in Bradley’s arm, wondering how they’d feel if he pinned Bradley’s hands above his head and explored them with his mouth. Bradley catches him looking and sniffs a laugh, and Colin reads an advert above his head for teeth whitening over and over and over, just for something else to do with his eyes. 

His thoughts dwell on Chloe, if Bradley specifically arranged not to have to go home tonight, if he noticed Colin noticing him at the film thing and interpreted this as some kind of proposition. He stares at their feet, and tells himself no, of course not. Bradley didn’t know he’d have the flat to himself, and there was no invitation back there helpfully showing itself in a crystal ball. He just about believes it until Bradley shifts, elbow nudging Colin’s side and staying there, like it’s careless, except his arm’s just a little too tense. Colin thinks of Bradley’s whisper in the theatre – lips closer and closer every time until the fleeting tease of breath and brushing skin made Colin squirmy like a cat, how he kept a needless conversation going, leant in more and more. He can’t decide if Bradley’s touches are a mirror of his fakely inadvertent kind, or if he’s just seeing what he wants reflecting back.

They pass the short walk from the station like magnets, sticking together at the elbow or the shoulder then bouncing away. The lift up to the flat has never felt smaller, and Colin clings to the rail behind his arse and wills his brain to stop picturing himself hitting the emergency stop button and cramming Bradley into the corner with a fistful of his hair and a mouthful of his neck. They judder to a halt, door pinging open, and down the corridor Colin unlocks the flat and flicks on the lights, stomach jittery and tight. 

‘Oh, well, this is very grown-up,’ Bradley says, and Colin can see it through his eyes, how very black and white and grey the place appears – the shelves the same colour as the walls and the floor, everything matching, not half a shade out. 

He catches Bradley’s gaze and smiles, and somehow it feels like they’re strangers swapping small talk before one of them gets on their knees. He pictures his hand on Bradley’s jaw, steering him into a kiss, and wonders if it really could be that easy. Heart racing with the thought he’s only frost-thinness away from doing something stupid Colin ducks into the kitchen for a couple of beers. It takes him two goes to find the drawer with the bottle opener in, and he talks too fast and leads Bradley over to the window in the lounge where the view over the city twinkles back and the Gherkin points at the stars.

‘It’s my favourite thing about the place, this window,’ Colin says. ‘It’s light all the time.’ He pauses and glances at the black. ‘Um, except you know at night, like now.’

Bradley laughs and Colin swallows, feeling like an idiot and wishing he had a local, a cool bar with garish sofas and amusingly kitsch cocktails to take Bradley to instead of bringing him here – but if such a thing exists he doesn’t know where it is. 

‘That him?’ Bradley says. ‘Your – what are we calling him?’

He sets his beer on the bookshelf, and points to a photo on the wall – one of Michael’s self-portraits. Black and white he sits with his legs slung over the arm of a no doubt terribly expensive designer chair, his head dangling over the other so his grey hair nearly sweeps the ground, his throat long and lean and exposed. 

‘Michael,’ Colin says. The word feels lumpy, and from nowhere it strikes him as odd that they’re Michael and Colin and not Mike and Col or Em and Cee or something more familiar. ‘He’s a photographer.’

‘He’ll be back at some point?’

‘Not tonight. He’s in Manchester, apparently, being interviewed tomorrow for that culture show – you know the one after the news where a bunch of professional critics sit around and use words like _prodigious ennui_ about some modern artist who’s crocheted a tablecloth out of their own snot.’

‘He looks old.’

‘Older,’ Colin says, neither missing nor disliking the note in Bradley’s voice that tries to veil a slight as a casual observation. 

‘Not quite what I expected.’ 

‘Is he not?’

‘Always figured you’d fall in love with an actor. Someone quirky and fun.’ 

‘Who says I’m in love?’

Colin gives it a flirty, dismissive spin, but Bradley lets out a little puzzled noise, and when he speaks his voice pinches with it.

‘Three years and you’re not, something’s up.’

‘Not everything’s a greeting card.’

‘No,’ Bradley says, and waves at the room. ‘This – for example – is like a magazine.’

‘I know, it’s a bit austere. Michael did it. He spends way more time here than me so I just let him get on with it, really.’

‘Sounds about right. You always were a bit of a workaholic. Never really cared about anything else.’

Colin tilts his head. They’re both smiling, but somehow the air stirs like they’re having an argument. Bradley’s looking at him like he can see his innards – not just his liver and his kidneys and the quivering meat of his heart, but the other stuff that flows around inside and is supposed to stay invisible to everyone. The air brittles in Colin’s nose, every lungful too thin and frail.

‘I do care about other things,’ he says, tracing the outline of the rug and thinking: _really, that rug is ridiculous. All bobbly and stupid and probably a nightmare to clean. Why did I never notice that before? And who cleans here? Do we have a cleaner? Is that why I can never find anything in the kitchen?_

‘I didn’t mean anything by it. Just you put work first.’ 

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

‘However devoted they are to something, most people let themselves fall in love, Col.’ 

‘It’s not _let_ – ’

Suddenly the conversation feels precarious, and Colin hears the deep, squidgy beat of his own heart everywhere, like a bass line echoing through the wall. He hovers on the edge of the rug, feeling like he doesn’t live here and they’ve both snuck in for the thrill of nosing through someone else’s things. He sets his beer down too, on a higher shelf than Bradley’s, watches foam rise up the bottle’s neck, each bubble pop and fizz into and then out of existence. He knows how they feel, rammed up against something and about to burst – only instead of glass he’s pushed up against an idea. Certainly Michael says – when he hangs up or when he’s just come – _love you, Colin_ – and Colin says _you too_ , but like a curtain that usually hides the truth has whipped back he realises that’s just something to say because he’s been cued. 

‘Why are we talking about this?’ Colin says, and tries a laugh.

‘Maybe because it’s important?’

‘Love makes the world go round?’

‘Not for you, apparently.’

Bradley’s tone aims for jovial and conversational but misses, too hard, and his gaze is so unflinching it makes Colin’s heart go _thunk thunk thunk_ even louder than before. Somewhere between thunks he realises: _shit, we’re not talking about Michael, are we? We’re talking about the beach. Fuck, was it love you were offering, then?_

‘We haven’t seen each other in years,’ Colin says. ‘You don’t know anything about me and what makes my world go round.’

‘I know you’re not happy.’ 

‘Says who?’

‘Says approximately half a million texts about space pigs.’

‘You replied to them all, so – ’

Colin lets it hang, because he’s not sure _so what_. He wishes he had a script, that he could thumb through this bit and see what happens and therefore know how this scene should go, because right now he can’t even really figure out how to stand or what to do with his face, and his hands feel awkward just dangling but he can’t think where else to put them.

‘You think if you fall in love, it’ll draw your focus, don’t you?’ Bradley says. ‘That you’re only as good as you are because you give it absolutely everything, to the exclusion of absolutely everyone. You keep people on the surface for fear if you let them in, they’ll elbow out the only thing you really care about.’

Colin flushes with the same mix of shame and anger and indignation he used to feel when one of the idiots at school caught him doing something they thought weird. He’d keep a smile on his face and shrug them off with a _whatever_ , while inside his head screamed: _how dare you – how dare you fucking notice me and make me feel exposed when I’m just quietly being who I am?_

‘That’s total shite.’ 

‘Maybe that’s too generous, then,’ Bradley says. ‘Maybe it’s more that you reel people in without feeling anything for them, just so you can see what they look like when you break them. Then you use their pain when you act, because you never let anyone close enough to generate any of your own.’

Bradley looks at him like a kid in a playground darting back and forth to ruffle someone’s hair, not knowing if they’re having a laugh or spoiling for a fight. Colin wants to _whatever_ him off, but the words hit like a bomb – not a direct strike on the thing he hoped no-one would ever notice, but close enough to explode and send shrapnel up into his lungs.

‘You really think I’d deliberately hurt – fuck, is that what you really think of me? That I’m that callous and that fucking _cold_?’

‘Like you said, I haven’t seen you in years,’ Bradley says, with a shrug. ‘Maybe you’ve changed, although to be honest it doesn’t look like it.’

‘Wow – well – good to know, I guess. Thanks for your candour,’ Colin says. He tries to shut out the world and collect himself enough to show Bradley some other face than the one that reveals the explosion happening in his stomach, but apparently Bradley’s ripped him into bloodied streaks and there’s not enough of him left to hold up an expression. And fuck, Michael might be a wanker but he’s never made him feel shredded. ‘This was stupid. I’m going to go.’

Colin scrunches a fistful of his own side and makes for the door, but he’s barely moved when Bradley catches his elbow.

‘Colin – what – wait – it’s your flat.’

‘At the risk of spouting a cliché, yeah, that’s how much I don’t want to be in a room with you.’ 

Colin attempts to wrench his arm out of Bradley’s grasp – but Bradley’s fingers dig in – hand so fucking steady and unavoidable on his arm. Caught, Colin stares at the floor, breathing hard through his nose, and Bradley’s fingers slacken but stay where they are. 

‘Jesus, Colin.’ 

Bradley doesn’t go on, and long enough passes that Colin wonders if it _was_ more of a jokey hair-ruffle thing to say – at first – and he overreacted, and if the rest wasn’t Bradley pushing and poking because the wound from the beach never entirely closed. Bradley’s still close, so close Colin’s lungs are full of sunshine and sheets, and rather than wanting to leave he wants to lean in and fold them together until he smells exactly like that too. _Shit_. He wonders how the fuck they got here and how the fucking fuck to get back out again.

‘Do you – ’ Bradley’s voice drops to almost a whisper. ‘ – do you have any idea what I really think of you?’

Bradley’s grip tightens as he gives him a kind of little shake. Colin blinks at the faded dusky red cotton of his t shirt, and wonders if it’s possible to hate someone for knowing you too well – enough to spot and press on the sorest of your truths – and want to crawl into them and hide at the same time because they see the darkest bits of you and don’t flinch away.

‘I spent years sleeping with people who looked a bit like you because – ’ 

Colin thinks, _fuck, don’t say it, don’t you fucking say it_ , and it works because Bradley just sort of breathes, too loud and a bit broken. Colin runs through his options – look up, don’t – and tries to think of a reply, but he can’t quite see which way he should play it. Admission? Should he confess all the phoney Bradleys he saw everywhere, hating them for the constant reminder and seeking them out all the same? Or deny it, deny it all, lock all this away where he’s kept it since the beach? Needing to let the rattled, desolate fizzing of emotion out Colin rubs his thumb over his own finger until the friction burns and he can hear the stupid grasshopper nervous hush above the high, reedy trill of his panicked thoughts. Why isn’t there a script for this? Why does he have to figure out what to do next on his own? 

But he’s not on his own, Bradley reminds him. His hand drifts down Colin’s arm before departing it entirely to settle on his hip. Colin lets it happen, lets his palm sit there splaying heat as it spans that bit of him where hip turns into side – and he’s sure there must be a name for that specific region but all his brain’s really thinking is: _fuck, were Bradley’s hands always that big? Or does it just feel that way because it’s on my fucking hip?_ Vaguely he remembers reading something in a tatty dentist waiting room gossip magazine, that to body language experts hands on shoulders and waists means friends but hips, hips are always sexual. 

‘Look at me.’

Colin tenses and resists, thinking: _no, I won’t, I can’t. If I do I’m going to forget how much you just hurt me because of your stupid, wonderful face_. Bradley makes this little pleading, appeasing noise in his throat, and _fuck_. Eyelids sort of trembling, Colin does meet his gaze. 

Bradley’s eyes are glassy and sad and the kind of earnest it hurts to look at, and no-one has ever looked at him with that kind of honesty outside of the confines of a play. Colin stares at Bradley’s mouth instead, picks out the little ridges in his lips and the tiny half-moon crease above the corner, a fossil of his smile. He thinks about tasting it, if it has the tang of veracity too, and as if he can hear Colin thinking – or has just realised where it is – Bradley lets his hand fall away. Colin knows he’s imagining it but still, his skin feels parched and cold like a desert at night without it there.

‘I should say goodnight,’ Bradley says, eyes darting to Michael on the wall.

‘Probably.’ 

Colin swallows, and as Bradley takes half a step back Colin glimpses the future: Bradley leaves; Michael comes home; he continues to live here trapped in a winter of discontent even when the sun is shining. Colin pictures himself falling into a grave while he’s still alive, clutching roses made of programmes to his chest, and it doesn’t feel like a daydream but a vision of what will happen if he lets Bradley take another step away. Colin reaches for the front of his t shirt. 

‘Don’t, though.’

Colin screws up the soft material into a knot. Rash and reckless and inconsolable about something which hasn’t even happened, Colin pulls Bradley in, breathing violently hard, searching his face for some hesitation. He finds none, just this startled, hopeful disbelief, and with his throat caving in Colin squashes the space between them and draws his lips over Bradley’s. Under his Bradley’s mouth gives, and he makes this little gasp through his nose. Colin waits for it to all spring away like an elastic band too tight and then released: so we’ve kissed now, look – _ping_ , gone. 

That doesn’t happen. Instead Bradley drags in a breath and Colin with it, fingers insistent on the back of his neck. Something fizzes and catches light behind Colin’s navel, and Colin kisses him again – and again – until it feels like they’re stretching and stretching and stretching, pulling ever tighter and more tense. Bradley’s mouth opens and Colin clings for dear fucking life to the ball of t shirt in his hand until it’s just a bunch of sweaty creases. One of Bradley’s hands slides up, fists the hair right on the top of his head, and through too much breath a hot meeting of tongues follows and the thrill of it races all the way down his spine to furl his toes.

They stagger, Colin awkwardly wrapping an arm around Bradley’s neck to keep them locked together, and Bradley jolts to a halt against the bookshelves. As their mouths find each other properly Colin’s thoughts – such that they are – whirl to the first time he ever read a kiss: a fantasy novel with thick-muscled warriors in twisted furs on the cover; words about mouths crushing together; pictures in his head of mottled, swollen lips the colour of red grapes; the shocking clutch of arousal as he read the same two lines over and over and over until they burrowed into his gut. _Just a kiss_ , he’d thought, but every night for weeks he chased the feeling, nudging at the different reactions of his body until he was fucking his own fingers in the dark and leaving teeth marks in the pillow to clamp down the bay of desire in his blood. 

With a groan on his tongue and his cock already so fucking hard his body recognises the high of something shocking and new and raw, and he grinds into the heat of Bradley’s body like a callow teen snatching his first taste of someone else. He runs a hand down between them, finds Bradley’s cock in a similar state, and at the thought that Bradley wants the same way he does, Colin’s mouth hangs open purposelessly for a second in the region of his nose while he tries to make air just air again and not this stifling thick thing he can’t really breathe. 

‘Col – ’

Bradley’s hands tighten on his sides, urging him back in with a pleading little kiss, sucking Colin’s bottom lip between his. This time Colin clutches for the bookshelf to use that for leverage, and when their mouths fall back into a kiss, Colin can’t help but work a knee between Bradley’s to make the most of him being trapped. The tiny rasp of their jeans as they shift together is just audible beneath the sloppy cacophony of their mouths, and all of Colin heats and tenses around the feeling this will disappear if he doesn’t take it right now. He nips at Bradley’s lip but his mouth drifts away, licking and kissing at Colin’s chin and then his neck and his ear. Each shiver collides and multiplies until it doesn’t really matter where Bradley’s mouth is as long as it’s on him. Colin’s head lolls as a scrape of teeth at the base of his throat makes his insides free-fall. He catches a glimpse of them in the window, reflected, all needy hands and desperate hips over the top of the city, Michael’s pictures on the wall. Colin’s heart stammers some kind of protest but he thinks: _it’s just this. Just kissing. Another moment and I’ll stop, I swear._

Bradley grabs his arse, dragging him in again against the bulge in his jeans, and Colin doesn’t stop at all. Not after that moment nor the one that follows, and they rub against each other like it’s possible to sate this by fucking friction and denim and heat. Wanting to taste, Colin ducks down and kisses everything he can reach. Under his mouth Bradley turns into shards of himself – a glimpse of flushed skin and ear, soft nearly blonde hair, a warm waft of summer sheets as Colin lifts his t shirt up and then off. He doesn’t look at Bradley’s face, just hears him swallow, and licks his chest – broader and more hair-sprinkled than he remembered, but softer and sweeter than he imagined. Bradley sags against the shelves – like it’s only them keeping him up – fingers bunched in Colin’s hair. He kisses the dips and hollows of the muscles in Bradley’s arms, running his tongue over each of them, skimming his lips a path to the base of Bradley’s neck where the concentrated scent of him sits. Bradley pulls him in flush – like he can’t bear for him to be further away – and acute want blooms in Colin’s stomach, something trying to pierce him from the inside out. 

All thoughts of stopping evaporate, and he reaches for Bradley’s buckle and undoes it with a tug. The muscles in Bradley’s stomach tighten, and Colin runs his fingers over them, then turns Bradley round, does the same to his back, pressing kisses to his shoulder and the nape of his neck until Bradley clutches the shelves and pushes back against him. The curve of his arse fits deliciously against Colin’s crotch, and Colin shifts into it, trying to muffle the noises clawing in his throat with mouthfuls of Bradley’s skin. He rambles kisses down his spine, sinking to kneel and messily tongue the crease where Bradley’s back turns into arse as he slides down jeans and boxers which are far too in the way. Bradley jerks as his cock’s freed, and Colin runs a hand up his thigh, reaching between his legs to skim his fingers up to meet his mouth. He glances at the window, where Bradley’s reflection stands, hunched and desperate and splayed, his head dipped as he bites his lip. _Fuck, he really wants me_ , Colin thinks, rent with whether it’s the most erotic thought he’s ever had or the most terrifying. Colin slides back up to mouth Bradley’s ear, but leaves his fingers playing in the crease of his arse, teasing and noting what makes his breath hitch. Bradley turns his head to kiss him, missing his mouth, tongue hot and imprecise on his cheek before he breathes out:

‘Fuck.’

Colin stares at the freckles on his shoulder, them hazing with the heavy weight of his pulse, bites at them lightly even though he can’t catch them in his mouth, thinking: _yes. But not here, not with the city watching. Not like we don’t know each other_. He steps away, and Bradley meets his eye, bereft. Colin can’t think of anything to say, so he just tugs off his top and unbuttons his jeans and holds his hand out in a sort of beckon. He steps out of his clothes and walks backwards to the bedroom, and Bradley leaves his puddled nest of fabric too and follows him, that same damn disbelieving hope blushed down his neck. 

Neither of them turns on the lights. Bradley reaches for his hips in the dark, splaying heat with his palms, pressing close, and like this, he’s all shadows and crevices and too direct eyes which see all the bits Colin’s spent a lifetime hiding from the world. Colin’s heart _thunk thunk thunk_ s for all its worth, and he buries his face in the crook of Bradley’s neck, on the pretence of a kiss.

‘Do you have any idea how much I’ve wanted this?’ Bradley whispers, scuffs a thumb to his cheek, and kisses Colin’s jaw, oddly chaste when they’re all but naked. 

It makes Colin’s stomach leap like it’s gone over the hump of a bridge without him. He wants to say _me too_ , but he can’t find those words, so instead he kisses Bradley hard, and murmurs a hoarse, ‘Show me,’ to his lips.

*

Colin stares over Bradley’s shoulder – where it appears he’s left a splodged impression of his teeth – at the blued-out shadows of oncoming morning. He replays fragments to make the accompanying feelings flitter and check they’re real: the abandon on Bradley’s face as he grabbed his arse and tugged his cock right into his mouth; a scattered conversation on the bed between kisses about _what, what do you want?_ and Colin answering _you, you, you_ , if only inside his own head; the fierce clutch in his chest at the sight of Bradley’s face in the pillow, his mouth open and breathing dampness onto the cloth. Colin thinks he probably should be thinking something about Michael, but all he can see is Bradley saying: _just don’t fucking stop_.

He wipes at his eyes and sighs. Colin’s played cheaters, people eaten up by guilt but always an hour too late, had thought them weak and callous for the way they justified it all with words about heat and moments. _You chased it_ , he’d think. _You chased it and made it happen. Are we really supposed to buy it took you by surprise?_ Now he thinks maybe he understands it better. The thrill of flirting with the idea draws you in, and then when there’s heat in a moment, you’ve created enough of a world between the two of you to feel separate from everything, like you’ve abstracted yourself from your life and got stuck. It’s like the two things aren’t even connected – life with Michael, thing with Bradley – utter separation. The wall stares back, like it’s thinking: _nice try. Hope that eases your conscience because it sounds terribly bullshit from here_. 

Bradley curls the pillow tighter into his elbow and murmurs, a reminder of another life where they’d pass out on each other’s sofas or on the floor halfway through a conversation. Sometimes they’d even wake up on each other’s shoulders, all sputtered apologies and too hot ears. Other times Colin would lie there in the dark, and pretend Bradley was his to fall asleep on. Bradley always looks sadder with sleep, and Colin watches him breathe for ages until he thinks: _fuck, am I that guy now? The one who lies awake all night watching someone’s nose work like it’s profound?_

The thought gives way to one about waking him: scuffing Bradley’s lips with his until they open, all sleepy and surprised; sliding on top of him and kissing him until he’s hard; working his way down his body until Bradley’s cock’s in his mouth and he’s fisting up the sheets and swearing at the ceiling. Colin swallows against a queasy swell in his gut, because there’s no heated moment here and apparently his body doesn’t give a fuck about morality. 

Bradley shifts closer, enough that his breath flutters over Colin’s wrist. It tickles, and Colin’s not sure why, but it feels wrong and intimate in a way that apparently screwing each other into the mattress did not. He shifts away and gets up. Quietly he retrieves a pair of boxers from the drawer and pulls them on, edges out into the lounge. 

Once he’s there he’s not sure what to do. He dodges the clothes they’ve left like a body trail with CSI deftness, makes tea and takes it and stands by the window. He leans on the wall and looks out over the city as it slumbers. 

He probably stands there for an hour or more thinking a whole lot of nothing before the door creaks and Bradley pads out. Colin watches his reflection – his stuck up hair and the way he’s smiling – and swallows. He closes his eyes as Bradley’s plants a wet kiss to his shoulder, something the size of a golf ball dropping to the base of his throat.

‘You’re up early,’ he says. He wraps an arm around Colin’s waist, and Colin lets him do it, even as he replies:

‘Things on my mind. Like, you know, how I’m a scab of humanity.’

‘Don’t.’ 

‘I cheated on someone. I’ve never – ’

‘It’ll be all right. We’ll work it out.’

_Will we? When have we ever had it in us to work anything out?_

‘How, exactly?’ 

‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s going to go great, then,’ Colin says, and the amount of venom he conjures surprises him, a little.

‘You’re not in love with him.’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Yes it is,’ Bradley says, delicately kissing the back of his neck, pressing closer so Colin can feel the hard line of his cock against his arse. 

Colin’s toes curl their damn, traitorous delight into the floor. He grips the mug, locking his fingers around it, and works his shoulder out and away from Bradley’s mouth.

‘Look, you got what you always wanted. I’ve – done something horrible. We have slightly different perspectives on this, and you acting like it’s some great romance is the last thing I need.’

‘Colin – ’

‘Could you just go?’

Colin’s expecting Bradley will protest – and maybe that’s what he wants, to deal with the feeling in his chest by shouting about something else. He sees half an argument – Bradley throwing up his palms and saying something about him being Saint Colin and sorry if this has rocked his self-image, but instead Bradley holds his hands out, palms offered in defeat, and turns and gathers his clothes. He gets dressed, and Colin stares at the window without a speck of care what’s beyond it, and listens to him, tracking his progress in the zip noises and rustles, telling himself to stop being whatever the fuck he’s being and go and say: _sorry, shit, I just – this is a lot, you know?_

The front door closes with a wrenchingly quiet little click. Colin bites his lips together until he can taste blood, and stands there so long the sky gets light and his tea has grown an oily purple film.

*

When the day stirs properly into being, Colin does what any cheater would: wrenches the covers off the duvet; balls up the sheets; shoves them and his clothes into the washing machine with twice as much powder as it says on the packet. He’s fucked if he can work out which programme he needs, so he selects the one for cotton – highest temperature – hits the button for an extra rinse. While the evidence washes away he gets into the shower, turns the water up until it’s too hot, and scrubs at his hair and his skin using handful after handful of gel and shampoo convinced he can still smell Bradley all over him. He leans on the tile and lets the water pour down, staring at the rivers it makes through the hair on his legs, thoughts hollow and blank, so long as he ignores the ones which ache with all the things he’d want to do if Bradley were still here.

He finds clothes and tugs them on, collects the bottles from the shelves – beer still fizzing, just – pours the contents away and tosses them into the recycling. When that’s all done he looks around the flat with no idea where he fits or what to do with his hands. He sinks down in front of the machine, pulls his knees up, and lets his head fall against the door.

The drum starts to spin, and as Colin sits there with it rattling his thoughts around his skull he realises some things don’t wash away with a glug of the drain. He has to tell Michael. Should he spit it straight out – _I spent last night fucking someone else – or lead into it and explain – not someone, not just anyone, someone I’ve had in my head for a long time_ – and either way should he wrap it in clichés, preface it with something stolen from a film – _there’s something I should tell you, we need to talk, it’s not you_ – so Michael knows something bad is coming? Colin presses his fingertips to his forehead, picturing it, how he’ll founder, because there’s nothing he’s worse at than finding the right words for the moments which matter most.

He chews his cheek, and hates himself a little bit for thinking about Bradley and how he said all the wrong things to him too, wondering if he should call and apologise. Questions and non-answers go round and round his head like the sheets, thwash-slop-thwack, thwash-slop-thwack, until all that’s left is an aged reflection of a voice, a teacher who never liked him, telling him: _well done. Well fucking done._

*

Michael comes home at dinner time. Grey fingerprints smudge under his eyes, so Colin tries to be normal, tries to ask about his trip, tries to care about the recording and the little anecdote he’s spilling – but all he’s thinking is: _fuck, can’t you tell I spent the whole day sitting on the floor? Can’t you see what I did all over me?_ When he apparently can’t Colin feels an odd stir of resentment: _surely it should be obvious if you know me at all that someone else walked in while you weren’t here and left the door to my soul ajar._

Michael pours himself a glass of wine, leans on the counter, and asks Colin if he wants to go out for dinner. He’s so fucking ordinary and unsuspecting Colin feels sick. He tells Michael he’s sorry but he’s not feeling well, and Michael lays a hand on his forehead. Colin shucks it off immediately, but still the pressure of his fingers makes spit pool on his tongue. Michael tells him to have a lie down, and as Colin crawls into bed the coldness of the sheets he tried to wash the guilt out of just creeps up into his skin and lodges there in goosebumps, even though he’s still in all of his clothes. He lies there, every beat of his heart too fast and too shaky. He thinks Michael will go to dinner – and maybe Colin could pack his stuff while he’s gone and leave a note, just so he can get the words right – but in the lounge Michael puts the TV on – turns the volume down so low he must barely be able to hear it. Colin screws his eyes shut and holds his breath, hoping if he does that he can freeze in this moment and stop a worse one before he has to prod it into being.

Eventually Michael comes to bed, careful and quiet as he slides under the sheets. The consideration of it constricts Colin’s chest – magnifies until he’s near exploding with it when Michael arranges the duvet over his arm. Colin thinks: _shit, maybe you’re not a wanker after all and fuck, fuck, fuck, this is the closest I’ve come to being in love with you, and why is it happening now – right now?_ He stares at the wall and swallows. Michael’s arm snakes around his waist, and noticing he’s awake he murmurs:

‘Any better?’ 

_No. I’m about to spew up years of being with you and not loving you like maybe I should have, and I think Bradley’s right about a couple of things but mostly about the way I’m going to have to watch you break._

Colin gets out of bed, because he can’t bear to do it lying down.

‘I slept with someone else,’ he says.

*

The fight is awful. Tears and histrionics and fists balled and arms waved and words about betrayal and love and everything they have. Even as it’s happening Colin knows he’s acting a bit, but he owes Michael that, right? He owes him the show, the show of love and recrimination and regret.

When everything falls to the stillness of sorrow, tears spent and the prospect of forgiveness dangling if he asks for it, Colin offers to go, even though it’s four o’clock in the morning. Michael says, _don’t_ , but Colin murmurs, _no, I should_. He wipes at his face, grabs his jacket, and meets his own eye in a photo on the wall: New Year’s Eve; his arm around Michael’s shoulder; laughing as he accepts a kiss on the cheek. He looks happy. He can’t remember if he was acting then too or not, or work out which one would be worse. He leaves, and in the lift his stomach recoils with disconnected martyr guilt like he’s just acted out a Passion play with no fucking clue what he was doing.

The streets shine with rain, lights bouncing off them and blurring in his eyes. Colin bunches his shoulders against the chill and walks and walks and walks until his lungs burn with having inhaled too much cold at the same time as fighting back tears. He finds a hotel – the kind of place where they usually charge by the hour, and outside a kid who looks fourteen offers to blow him for a fiver. Colin declines, and the woman at reception startles at him being alone, but takes his card, anyway, and shoves a key to 112 across the desk. 

The room stinks of mould and discarded shoes, and Colin sits on the window ledge and stares out at the city. The glass presses frigid and hard on his forehead, and because it’s easier than everything else, he finds two droplets on the other side of the pane and makes a bet in his head about which one will be the first to fall.

*

It’s messy, breaking hearts at this age, a mix of looks across the lounge that scream like a fifteen year old in anguish while they say sensible things about the mortgage and ask how each other’s parents took the news.

When Colin closes the door on Michael for the final time, with a box full of CDs and books in his arms, he wonders what he’s supposed to do. If this were a film he’d mark the end of the act: call a friend; get roaring drunk; pass out on a sofa somewhere so a better feeling could dawn with a new day. There’s no-one in his phone for this, though, no-one who wouldn’t think he’s behaved like a total cunt. 

Colin slinks back to the hotel he’s staying in – a slightly nicer establishment than the one with the blowjobs on the doorstep – and adds the box to the pile of his life he’s already made in the corner.

He nearly calls Bradley, but never makes it all the way to hitting dial. He tells himself it’s some respectful thing for Michael, that at least he can say: _yeah, I fucked someone else but it’s not like the instant we disentangled our lives I was with him completely and utterly like you never happened._

A week passes, and Colin sits with his phone thinking he’s already broken Michael’s heart – can he really make it worse with a phone call? He still doesn’t press dial, unsure what he’d even say to Bradley – _I was harsh and appalling, and mostly I think I want you to come over and look at me like you do to make me feel better, so on top of being a cunt I’m woefully selfish. Fancy it?_

He leaves it another four days, and then he’s sitting staring at his phone and deciding he’s left it so long he needs to do more than call. Idly Colin wonders what a writer would do with the situation. Probably there’d be a gesture: he’d write to the BBC and get a message sketched into the background of the next episode of space pigs; at the very least he’d stand outside Bradley’s window with his iPod and speakers and play some kind of power ballad to say all the things he can’t himself. 

As he tosses the ideas around he realises there’s a reason writers write that stuff and get actors to play it all out: no real person would ever have the balls. An actor can flip the page and see: _okay, I make a tool of myself, but oh! There’s a sunset with our names spelled out in clouds to walk into_ ; or _oh, Bradley tells me to get fucked – and not the fun sort – and I’m shattered and I kill myself, but wait! He’s sorry when I’m gone, look! Says so right there._

Uncertainty, that’s the thing Colin hates about real life: never being able to see what’s over the page; never knowing how to play now because of it.

His phone buzzes in his hand, and he jumps. In a film, it’d be Bradley. But of course it’s not, so it’s Stephanie saying the people from the potato poet thing want to see him and he can he do today, can’t he? 

Colin goes because why wouldn’t he be free, and tries to be who he usually is, but he can’t find his effervescence or any kind of emotional truth in the scene, and he can tell they can see it. He says goodbye and shakes everyone’s hand, and he can already hear them telling Stephanie they decided to go another way. 

He goes back to his hotel and makes a cup of tea from a travel kettle with a too-short flex. Stephanie calls and confirms his suspicion that he didn’t get the part, and he’s halfway through drinking his tea when it strikes him that maybe he was always right to keep anything too emotional at arm’s length because look what happened the first time he pulled it in close. He closes his eyes and thinks: _fuck, what if I can’t shut all that stuff out again? What if I’m stuck in this mess and there’s no escape?_

Colin throws the mug at the wall. It bounces rather than smashes – he’s always been pretty wank at throwing – and he watches the brown liquid race down the paint, breathing hard. Then he clears up, winces at the little dent he’s made in the plaster, and wonders if he should go to reception and confess. 

Later the hotel room hangs about him. The wallpaper looks like it’s crawling with insects and the shadows turn into heart-stopping villains just at the flicker of an eyelid closed. Colin slumps against the pillows, turns on the TV, but can’t find anything worth watching and can’t find a channel that’s just a buzz of white noise, either. 

He reaches for his phone and types in Bradley’s number, thinking to call and shout at him for ruining his life. He stares at the digits, picturing just the note of bite he’ll add to his tone as he spits out: _oh, just so you know – when you waltzed back in and opened the door to my soul you apparently let out my ability to act. Thanks for that_. Before he can, thoughts of another lifetime which had brighter colours than this one sneak in: occasionally night would fall and bring with it uncertainty about a scene and what the fuck he was doing trying to play a fucking _legend_. Colin would crawl to Bradley’s room in his pyjamas and pretend he’d just thought of some prank that couldn’t wait. Bradley would let him in with his hair all pillow-fuzzed, and if he knew what really prompted the visit he always had the decency not to let on. _Save a life, ruin a life, that’s equilibrium, right?_ Maybe that’s why Colin’s anger flattens as soon as its flared, and it’s beyond pathetic, but suddenly he just wants to hear Bradley say his name.

Colin hits _dial_ , and it takes an age but then Bradley says:

‘Colin?’

‘Hi. I just – I – ’ 

Apparently Bradley saying his name isn’t all-healing magic after all, and he can’t think what to say. He hears Bradley sit up, and there’s a rustle like he’s rubbing at his forehead. 

‘What’s up?’

‘Everything, pretty much.’ Bradley leaves a gap for him to explain, but Colin can’t, so instead he just says: ‘Do you want to come over?’ 

‘It’s the middle of the night. I can’t just leave.’

‘Right – sorry – I know, I just – ’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’ 

Colin closes his eyes, then screws them tighter shut to try and black out the emotion pushing its way up his throat. 

‘I – I’m sorry I woke you,’ Colin says, and goes to hang up, but Bradley’s voice strays up from his palm.

‘Tomorrow? Chloe has a play date. I was going to be sensible and do four loads of washing but – we could have coffee, or something?’

Colin nods, over and over, before he remembers Bradley can’t see him. He tries to wrap his mouth around words, but they feel clunky and all he can find is:

‘Pick somewhere and text me the address?’

He hangs up, unintentionally cutting Bradley’s goodbye off halfway through, and fidgets with the sheets until dawn.

*

‘You look – well, you’ve looked better,’ Bradley says.

‘Thanks.’

Colin rubs at the hollow under his eye – the one that started twitching at five and hasn’t stopped. He stares into his tea, then at the wall above Bradley’s head, gaze restless over the curved bare brick, then the sofa opposite where a couple of girls are all over each other, then the speciality board advertising a list of cakes named after old films: Strangers On A Wholegrain Scone; An Éclair To Remember; The Invisible Flan. Bradley’s brought him to the kind of café you have to know to find – a regular haunt – and Colin wonders if this is what Bradley has been doing since _Merlin_ , populating his existence with cool stop-offs and other trappings of an actual life. They’ve never felt more different, and Colin wonders what the fuck he was thinking, imagining they could ever fit together. 

‘How you been?’ Bradley says.

‘Peachy.’

‘Seemed it at arse o’clock this morning.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ Colin says. ‘I broke up with Michael, I’m living in a hotel, and I didn’t get a part I wanted because apparently I was over-emotional and too depressive. And I was supposed to be playing a poet starving in the potato famine for fuck’s sake, so that’s saying something.’

Bradley looks like he wants to laugh, and Colin bites his thumbnail, which is apparently enough of a signal for Bradley to keep the noise in his mouth.

‘How was it – Michael?’ 

Colin chews a back friend off too quickly, rips into fresh skin, tastes blood. He stares at his thumb, at the little riverbed of exposed flesh and the tiny trickle of red, and, unsure whether he’s avoiding the question, the metaphor of it, or dealing with his injury, gets up.

‘Where are you – ’

‘Toilet. Back in a minute.’

Colin rinses his thumb, turns off the tap, and listens to his own heart as it _thunk thunk thunk_ s behind his eyelids. This thought surfaces, this vague, panicked rattle: there’s a chance he’s ruined his career and a relationship with someone who wasn’t really a wanker and made his parents think less of him for the sake of a stupid fuck. And yeah, it’s Bradley who he sees everywhere, but Bradley has a daughter and a life and a café where people greet him like a friend – how will that ever work? Colin can’t even be civil to him, apparently, because every time he thinks about what happens next between them his chest panics into a flurry of question marks, and makes him want to do anything – absolutely anything – to keep Bradley away. He presses at his twitching eye, because all that’s tied up with a nice tidy bow of: _if letting Bradley sneak in and open my soul let all my acting ability out, what the fuck will I do with I life? I literally can’t do anything else. I’m useless at everything but that. If that’s gone_ – 

The door squeaks open.

‘Come here,’ Bradley says, and touches his shoulder, turning Colin gently towards him. 

Colin resists – tensing – but Bradley ignores him and wraps his arms around, tight and warm and cossetting. He’s irresistible and solid, and Colin sinks into him, closing his eyes and curling into Bradley’s neck. He breathes at Bradley’s skin and thinks: _maybe not_ just _a stupid fuck, then_ , but somehow that makes him feel utterly lost, even though Bradley’s arms are everywhere in a cling. 

‘I remember what it’s like. Even if you know it wasn’t love and it’s for the best,’ Bradley murmurs, ‘it hurts.’

Colin tightens his grip on Bradley’s waist, thinking: _no, don’t hint, don’t share, here – I can’t deal with thinking you did this to someone for me when you didn’t even know you’d get me_ – and he kisses Bradley’s shoulder, rucking the fabric of his shirt up beneath his palms and clinging to it.

‘You could have called, before,’ Bradley says, kissing his hair. ‘I would have been there.’ 

Colin presses his forehead into Bradley’s collarbone so hard purple sparks flare behind his eyes, thinking: _oh, don’t be nice. I can’t stand it when you’re nice – especially when I didn’t even make a stupid power ballad gesture_.

‘I know you think everything’s falling apart, but it’s not, Col, it’s really, really not.’

Bradley’s hands skim his back, and Colin feels tears spring in his throat. To keep them down he nuzzles his way to Bradley’s mouth, nose sticking a little on the warmth of his skin. He angles his head to kiss him, tasting the bitterness of coffee on Bradley’s breath as his mouth opens – all soft and accommodating. Colin pushes for more, searching out his tongue, this surge of sudden, hot-cold alertness – like breathing in after a mouthful of mints – racing up his spine. Colin presses his hips against Bradley’s, trying to impress what he wants – something unspecific but hurried, maybe with his face against a cubicle wall. He slides his hands under his shirt to the plane of Bradley’s stomach, round and down over his arse, kneading, bringing him closer, but Bradley eases away and meets his eye.

‘You trying to make me want to fuck in the toilets, Colin?’

Colin’s mouth hitches to the side and he thinks: _yeah, a little bit. Know where I am with that_. Bradley shifts away, scuffs his chin like he’s done something scampish, and mutters something about liking the muffins here too much to get thrown out for that. He ducks his head, sighs, and in the wake of the gesture Colin can see Bradley’s actually turned into a grown-up. There it is, the difference again, because Colin’s entire life fits into a couple of cardboard boxes he had to ask the guy whose heart he broke to find for him because he’s just that pathetic and inept at real life.

‘Why don’t you come round tonight?’ Bradley says, touching his neck, skimming the skin.

‘To your house?’

‘Yes to my house. There’s stuff everywhere but I’m seventy per cent certain you won’t catch anything.’ 

_You have a daughter and a life. You can’t just invite me into that like it’s nothing. I’m the guy who keeps everyone on the surface and just tried to fuck you in a café where they’re so twee they serve Invisible Flan, remember?_

‘Domestic.’ 

‘If you were looking for a party boy, Colin, I’m afraid you kind of missed the boat.’ Colin swallows, and half turns away, catching sight of their reflections. He looks worn out and thin and like he’s wearing someone else’s clothes, and Bradley touches his elbow with care that’s sort of sickening to watch. ‘Just come round. It’s no big deal. We’ll – get a take away and talk.’

‘Not really looking to explore my feelings, here.’

‘You do have those, then?’

‘Fuck you,’ Colin says, and pushes the door open, it swinging shut again on Bradley calling his name.

*

Colin stands in the middle of a lounge looking at a great amount of light and space. Or so the estate agent says. He coos about the view over the river and asks about the deposit and smiles in all the right places as the guy does his little speech about the area and the other residents and how sought after the address is. Colin’s head feels as blank as the walls. _Fuck it, take it. It’s just somewhere to live_. So he does, and when he moves in he stares at his things, thinks _they’ll never fit here_ , and tosses most of them out, subscribing to clichés about fresh starts, even though it’s himself he thinks needs to be chucked in the bin.

He lasts a week of pacing and forcibly not thinking about Bradley and watching _The Wire_ on DVD in his barren new place before he decides he needs a break. He thinks about Portugal or maybe New Zealand, but unable to face the wait for a flight he goes online and uses some last minute bargain site to rent somewhere by the sea. A couple of hours later he’s on a train watching darkness race across the tracks, his iPod blaring something he’s sure he used to like but which has turned into a meaningless mush of notes since the last time he listened to it.

It’s late when he arrives. A woman as wide as she is tall hands him his keys and he wrestles his way into a tiny stone cottage where everything smells of bleach. He goes to do what he normally does in a new place – find all his things a home to make familiar the unfamiliar space – then he thinks: _fuck it. Fuck what I usually do and who I usually am. Isn’t that what I’m trying to escape?_ There’s a bottle of welcome wine in the fridge, so he opens it and grabs a mug and drinks the whole thing sitting on the floor while the TV plays him late night poker, getting really into it and offering advice to the players, even though they can’t hear him and he has no idea what the rules are.

When he wakes up it’s to the drone of breakfast news, eye-to-eye with the dust under the sofa. A bit of him is ridiculously pleased with himself for this tiny rebellion no-one will ever see; the rest of him keeps still and desperately hopes he won’t hurl on the carpet.

The sun’s behind the trees when Colin finally feels up to crawling around the door frame to go into town, wishing every step of the way he was the kind of person who could get away with wearing sunglasses. He finds a little supermarket and buys a random assortment of food and a packet of popcorn because the label’s grinning at him and his body wants salt. 

On his way back he listens to the shake of the sea and watches gulls make black smiles against the sky. He’s barely paying attention when he spews out onto a cliff with a déjà vu vista of grey waves and low cloud. It takes him a moment and some rapid blinking but:

‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.’

Below is the beach he’s been avoiding for years. He hadn’t recognised the place name – if he’d ever known it – and he stands staring at the strip of pebbles and the expanse of rock, trying not to see the ghost of himself wandering lost by the shore.

*

Colin thinks about leaving straight away but doesn’t, and over the next few days he discovers it’s a nice place: people say hi as he passes; the shops all smell of freshly-baked cake; and children play like they’ve learnt how to be children from bucolic landscapes painted last century.

Thinking to share that or record it somehow, Colin calls into one of the cake-smelling shops and buys eight postcards for a pound and a book of stamps. He takes them on the long walk down to the beach with a biro, and sits with pebbles making patchwork of his arse as he balances the first one on his knee. He scrawls _Hello_ but can’t get any further. He sees that image again, the one with the coffin and the programme flora, a headstone with the words, _here lies Colin Morgan. He was an actor, wasn’t he?_ chipped away. _Other people build a life. You built a career. Now go on, try and send a postcard to that._

Defeat – this aching fucking sinking _defeat_ – rises up from the stones, and Colin can’t remember why he got so fucking invested in acting, why he let everything and everyone slide beneath it. Did something happen when he was tiny that was so fucking terrible it made him want to flee his own life and hide in other people’s imaginary worlds? If there’s some tragedy that sparked it, he’s forgotten it, and half-heartedly Colin waves the blank face of a postcard at the air like a white flag, and says:

‘Whatever, I surrender. You won, life.’

Nothing happens, so he flops back on the stones and stares at the clouds as they jostle in the sky. 

Eventually – when he’s so cold he can’t remember what it felt like to have hands – the clouds squidge together into a conversation he had with Bradley just after filming the first series. In a mini bus to god knows where, Colin rested his head on the window, the road making burbles of his words:

‘What you doing next?’

‘Dinner, I thought,’ Bradley said.

‘I meant work-wise.’

‘Dunno. See what comes up. Wouldn’t mind a rest, to be honest. See if my mates have forgotten my name.’

Colin had been confused by his lack of drive, and jealous, jealous he wasn’t completely fucking freaking out at the thought of months inside his own skin. Another memory squashes into it, the scene which unfolded the last time they were here:

‘What did you get for lunch today?’ Bradley said.

‘It’s some rice and green thing. I wouldn’t want to commit to an actual vegetable. This new caterer hasn’t really got the hang of me yet.’

‘You probably give them nightmares. You’re the nemesis of every chef.’

‘Something to show for myself, I guess. It’s pretty vile, actually. Almost as bad as that stew thing that made me barf for hours.’

Bradley sniffed, remembering, maybe, the jokes he’d made about Colin not being able to hold his drink before he realised Colin wasn’t hungover. Then – without a word – he’d brought over bottled water and chewing gum, and just left them where Colin could reach.

‘So,’ Bradley said. ‘We seem to have a situation.’

‘Is it because I keep setting all your clocks to run different amounts of late so you never really know what the time is?’

‘No, that’s – fucking hell, how long have you been doing that?’

‘Couple of weeks.’ 

‘That’s – genius. I thought the stress was really getting to me.’ 

Colin laughed, and Bradley shook his head, impressed and baffled. Then his face softened, this slight touch of a blush on his cheeks.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘what I meant was – the way we are, Colin.’ 

‘Are you quoting Gladys Knight?’

‘No. What I mean – we’re not just mates here, are we.’ 

‘Are we not?’

‘Can I be blunt? I feel like bluntness is – preferable. I think – well, I don’t have a lot to compare it to, but lately – actually for a while, I’ve been feeling something more than I expected to, you know, for you. Something more than I’m used to. I’m beginning to suspect we’re, well, more than friends.’ Bradley added a nervous squint. ‘This is the part where you say, ‘me too’ before I make a complete and utter twat of myself.’

Over the shushing of the water, Colin can hear his own reply: _I don’t want you to think I don’t, like, like you, it’s just my unbreakable rule_. There’s a bit he didn’t add: _I kind of made it up when I was fifteen, and it’s served me pretty well, but I never liked any of the others I said that to quite like I like you. Still, I’ll hide behind it, if you don’t mind, because you’re something I don’t know how to do without a script._

Colin wants to white it all out with Tipp-ex so he can scrawl: _yeah, me too. Me really, really too_ over the top and live the last years anew. In fact, fuck that: he wishes he could go back, tap his own shoulder, and punch himself in the face. 

A lamentable lack of time machines means instead he just lies there hating himself until the tide creeps in and soaks his feet.

*

The wind blows in off the sea and rustles Colin’s hair as he sits cross-legged on the steps which lead the way back up. While waiting for his trainers to dry he watches the waves come in and eat the entire beach, and fancies the ghost of himself splashed up against the stone, drowning.

Colin gets his biro out, and on the blank space on the postcard he tried to surrender with he writes:

> _Hello,  
>  I hope you’re well. And Chloe too. Say hi to her for me. If that’s not weird because she’s no idea who I am._
> 
> _I went away for a bit. Spur of the moment thing. Cottage is nice for a place you randomly choose off the internet. There are new space pigs to watch – I saw this morning and thought of you because against the odds you were right about Porkchop and the farmer. You and your damn intuition._

Colin’s out of room – none left even to write his name. And he’s not done – not nearly done – so he doodles a 1. in the corner, tucks the postcard under his thigh, and keeps writing.

> _2.  
>  I bought a bunch of postcards today. It took me hours of quality cloud-staring but I realised there’s only one person I want to care I’m here. That’s sort of terrifying when you think. There are billions of people on the planet (and granted I haven’t met them all) but there’s only one whose caring really matters to me.1 in 70,000,000,000, and we met for reasons that are statistically unlikely at best. Would you credit it? _
> 
> _3.  
>  I’m at our beach. I didn’t mean to be but I am. Maybe my subconscious has it in for me. Maybe it’s coincidence and I’m just reading things into it. Maybe it’s not our beach and I’ve just lost my mind enough to think it is. _
> 
> _Anyways, it’s prettier than I remembered, and everything smells of cake, and earlier there was this woman jogging in pink velour and this guy with a dog who watched her arse jiggle like a total pervert._
> 
> _4.  
>  My first kiss was a pretend one. I was in a play and I had to snog this girl, only I’d never done it before. I didn’t want people to know, and when it was coming up in rehearsals I tried to find someone to do it with for real so I’d know how it was supposed to go. There wasn’t anyone who fancied me, though – not that I’d have known how to ask them out anyway – so I watched a load of TV kisses and just did what I thought I would if it were real, and tried to feel something to sit behind it. _
> 
> _I never wanted anyone to know that._
> 
> _5.  
>  The kiss went really well, according to everyone. And I thought: maybe there’s no difference, then, between reality and pretend if you’re good enough at pretending. Sometimes I think things only feel real to me when they’re pretend, or I’m so concerned with how to make things look convincing that I don’t really know how to feel. Maybe that means all my kisses have been fake ones. Except the ones with you. I think they were real, in as much as there was something sitting behind them and it wasn’t something I put there on purpose._
> 
> _(I’m not trying to explain anything, but if you’re looking for a précis of the way my head works, that’s as close a thing as you’re ever going to get from me)_
> 
> _6.  
>  I’m very, very sorry. I wish there was a better word than ‘sorry’ because that’s what you say when you tread on someone’s toe. I was having an – I want to say existential crisis but honestly I just like the way that sounds and I don’t know if I am or if I’m just a bit of a knob. Acting is my existence and I kept thinking what if you made that go away, who am I, then? And that is a bit of a crisis, I guess, in my existence, so maybe it counts._
> 
> _(but I still acted like a knob)_
> 
> _7.  
>  For what it’s worth – which is maybe nothing – I feel like a fuckwit and an arsehole. At the seaside. On my own. Which makes everything worse for some reason, and I’m not sure I get why. Maybe it’s the fact that the spectres of people having fun are everywhere here. Except right on the shore, where all I can see is myself making a really huge mistake._
> 
> _8.  
>  I don’t think I’ve said much you’re supposed to say on postcards. But I guess I can end with this cliché because I mean it more than anything: wish you were here._
> 
> _C_

Colin pulls on his damp shoes, and when he gets back to the village which passes for civilisation, he walks down the street to the blob of red on a wall, and feeds his SOS one postcard at a time into the waiting mouth of the post box.

*

Three days later, Colin sits at the table in the cottage with his phone and a Chinese take-away, some chop suey thing with mushrooms that look like little grey foetuses and carrots that have been needlessly cut into stars. He checks his phone to see if it’s still got the same amount of signal, and hates each one of the bars for what they mean.

*

The beach becomes a sort of friend, the kind he’s never sure likes him back. The wind turns harsher when the tide’s out and he gets used to the pattern of dog walkers and tracksuits – Miss Pink Velour jogs at ten, that little yappy Yorkie with the penchant for barking at the waves means it’s lunchtime, when the thick-set guy with the zip-up cardie shows and it’s time to think about getting back before the tide cuts him off.

Colin fiddles with a pebble that looks a bit like a squashed heart, his phone still stoic with silence in his pocket. He thinks: _maybe I could stay here and be a painter. And I can barely draw a straight line that looks like what it’s supposed to, but if there’s nothing else in my life, fuck it, I’ll learn._

*

‘You on holiday, then, are you?’ Miss Pink Velour stops at his feet, wiping the back of her wrist over her sweaty blonde fringe. ‘You’ve been here every day for a week.’

‘Kind of, I guess,’ Colin says. 

She breathes in, noisy and wet, jogging on the spot, and Colin wonders where the pervert guy is, if he’s jerking himself off through his slacks.

‘Me, I like sunshine,’ she says. ‘That’s why I’m here – trying to get my beach body back before I go away.’ 

Colin smiles to cover up that he’s wishing she’d go away right now.

‘Good luck.’

‘Ta,’ she says, and gestures that she’s going before she does. 

Colin squints at the sea and watches her heels as they kick up. He thinks: _that’s what’ll happen to me if I stay here. I’ll be that weird guy who sits and draws on the beach – badly – and bothers strangers with his words in case he forgets how to make them happen in his mouth_. He sighs, and it strikes him as exquisitely tragic that it would probably be a better existence than what’s waiting for him in an empty rented flat.

He thinks about going back there, sees the two ways it could go. One: he’s right and he can’t act anymore because he’s in too many pieces to sure up the façade of being someone else; he’ll slowly eat through his savings and then get some bar job and spend the rest of his days as an alcoholic telling stories of all the things he did way back before the gin. Two: he’s being a melodramatic bastard and he’ll land a film set somewhere rugged or some play about a guy with a twisted psyche or a mental disorder; he’ll swear to himself that this time he won’t let it be everything, that he’ll get a pet or a plant at least; but he’ll slip back into it, into running from reality, into hiding from Bradley by being someone Bradley never met. 

Colin’s not sure which one would be worse. He watches the waves, and decides that when he gets back to the cottage, he’ll call the owner and see if he can extend his stay and put off finding out.

*

Colin pokes at his Cornflakes. He’s mercilessly holding down a burnt one to drown it with his spoon when the doorbell goes, and he startles, because he didn’t know the cottage had one. He gets up, peers around the hall wall, picturing the god of breakfast foods come to take revenge for his cereal killing.

It’s worse. The shadow behind the glass in the front door looms the same shape Colin used to dodge in a crowd: Bradley’s. He ducks back into the kitchen thinking: _shit, Bradley drove all this way to tell me to keep my soul and fuck off and stop sending him postcards_. His heart pounds in his ears, and he eyes the back door, the staircase, and the window, but before he can make a run for any of them Bradley raps on the glass, leans in, and says: 

‘I can see you in the mirror, Colin. Let me in?’

Colin’s stomach buckles, but his thoughts steady: _Bradley probably didn’t come all this way to tell me to fuck off – that’d be such a waste of time and petrol and energy. He’s probably here for the opposite. Hell, what’s the opposite of telling someone to fuck off? Is there such a thing as fucking on? Are we fucking on for whatever this thing is?_

Bradley knocks again, and Colin digs his nails into his palms. _Go and open the door before he does fuck off and leave you a badly drawing boy on the beach, you moron_. He flattens his hair, then takes a deep breath – and another just so he’s nice and dizzy – and goes down the hall to tug the door open, fixing some kind of smile in place.

The door won’t budge from the frame. Colin tries again, thinking: _crap, is this a sign?_ Then he remembers: he watched the original _Wicker Man_ last night, and dead bolted the door just in case the cake-smelling locals turned overnight. He ducks down, Bradley’s shadow leaning on the glass to see what the hell’s taking so long, and under the wake of his gaze and in an effort not to look like a totally inept fool in front of the man he maybe just maybe loves, it takes Colin three tries to undo the bolt. By the time he manages to slide it free and open the damn door his hands are really, really shaking. He can’t look at Bradley’s face. He just stares and stares and stares at the middle of his chest with his fingers working over each other and his knees giddy with unspent jiggles and his heart unstably rattling somewhere in the bottom of his throat. 

‘It’s a hell of a drive,’ Bradley says, after a moment. ‘You could at least say something.’

‘Glad you could make it?’ Colin says, and Bradley laughs, which might actually be the best sound in the world.

Colin knots his fingers together to try and keep them still, and glances up. There’s a nervous flicker in Bradley’s eyes, like he’s taken a chance in a scene and done something that’s not strictly speaking on the paper in front of him but which he means right down to his toes. 

‘Do you have any idea how hard it was to find you?’ Bradley says. ‘I’ve been here since yesterday, walking around asking people if they’ve seen Merlin. The guy in the bakery actually asked if I’m on a quest. Talk about embarrassing. Would it have killed you, Colin, to put the fucking _address_ on one of those cards?’

Colin laughs because no it didn’t, and Bradley being indignant is so fucking adorable he wants to squash him into his chest and keep him there indefinitely. He wants to say that, but the words aren’t there, so he just reaches for the first bit of Bradley his fingers can get to – which happens to be his sleeve – and clings to the ribbed bit of the cuff. Bradley sniffs, almost amused, and reaches to tug on the front of Colin’s top in return, looking at him with that same underserved, endless fondness he used to. For a moment they just stand there in this ridiculous doorstep tableau: two grown men clinging to bits of each other’s clothes.

‘Why didn’t you answer your phone?’

‘You – you rang?’ Colin says.

‘So many times I feel intimately acquainted with your voicemail.’

‘Oh. I – I turned it to silent so I couldn’t hear you not ringing any more. And then I didn’t want to see you not ringing so I put it under a cushion. And that was better, because then I didn’t know for certain that you hadn’t called, only that I hadn’t seen whether you had or not.’

‘Logical.’

‘Not really.’

‘No, there’s a – Colin logic to it.’

‘Actually I think I stole it from this guy who did a weird, cruel thing to cats.’

Colin scrunches a handful of sleeve, because that’s apparently the only way to deal with the wave of nerves breaking in his stomach at the thought Bradley thinks about the way he thinks enough to recognise a pattern. Bradley peers at him through bits of his fringe.

‘You over your existential crisis?’ he says.

‘Not really.’

‘You think a walk on the beach might help?’

*

Birds flutter in a swarm above, cawing, and they stroll along the bracket of the cliff, buffeted by the wind. Colin keeps his elbow nestled into Bradley’s, like nothing in the universe has the same importance as maintaining elbow-sleeve-sleeve-elbow contact, or maybe he’s just focusing on that to keep his mind from straying to the blank pages in front of him.

‘What did you do with Chloe?’ he says.

‘Left her with her doting grandma.’

‘You didn’t have to. I’d have come back. Probably.’

‘Probably?’ Bradley says, and looks at him from underneath lifted eyebrows.

‘Was thinking I might stay and be a painter who can’t paint.’

Bradley mugs confusion and acceptance, and it’s so familiar – an expression worn on so many late nights when Colin tried to explain some film or novel he was really into that Bradley tried desperately to get but didn’t – Colin nearly laughs.

They wend their way down the steps, and drop down onto the pebbles with a crunch-crunch. 

‘Smaller than I remember,’ Bradley says.

‘You do remember, then? You knew where I meant when I said – ’

‘Not hard to figure.’

Pot-bellied clouds skid on the horizon, and they walk until the rocks break into a thin strip of soggy sand with old women fingers of abandoned seaweed showing the way to the waves. Bradley dips down to pick up a stone and skims it into the surf. They both watch it plop up a little crown of water and disappear, and Colin digs his hands into his pockets and wraps them in the lining.

‘You know you’re being ridiculous,’ Bradley says, not looking at him as he ducks down for another stone, and rubs the sand off it. ‘Even if you didn’t get to be a potato poet it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Feels like it does. What if I can’t get another job?’

‘You’ll go on _Strictly Come Dancing_ , and somewhere between the waltz and getting injured in training and plugging on through the tears – ’ Bradley tosses the stone and looks at him, one eyebrow lifted. ‘You know what? It’s such a totally ludicrous suggestion I can’t even see a comedy contingency plan.’ 

‘I sewed all those sequins onto my t shirts, for nothing, then?’

Bradley smiles, but then he’s very serious, and he meets Colin’s gaze with wind making a tango of his hair.

‘You said it was me – I’m the reason – but I would _never_ ask you to choose. You do know that? You do know that I know what acting means to you and I’d never – make it a contest, me or it.’

Colin swallows, and nods, because maybe he did know it but hearing it is better.

‘And I don’t want you to think I’ve been keeping tabs on you with tragically obsessive Googling,’ Bradley says, ‘but you’ve been working _a lot_ – a rest – ’ Bradley stops when Colin wets his lips. Maybe he can see in the gesture some tell: _that’s not what this is really about. It’s a subplot._ ‘What, then?’

The words fall, excessively gentle, onto the rocks. Colin fingers the lining in his pocket, and apparently finding a crumb of courage amongst the fluff he says:

‘What you said about me, when you said I reel people in and I break them – ’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘You should’ve. The last time we were here, I broke your heart, didn’t I?’ 

‘Not exactly.’

‘Just my own, then.’

A sad smile twitches on the corner of Bradley’s mouth, and he pulls Colin down to sit next to him on the stones. They’re almost exactly where they were, and Colin can feel the ghosts of themselves they left here, breathing on the back of his neck, willing him to lay them at rest.

Bradley stares at the waves as they whisper back and forth, and Colin thinks: _well this is it. This is him giving you the space to say it, to say it all, to do the speech you should have been practicing for years, the one that explains everything you feel so it makes absolutely perfect sense._ If there are lines, though, he doesn’t have them down. Colin stares at his feet. All the stones scattered around them look a bit like squashed hearts, and he wonders which two are theirs.

‘What would you have done, back then, if I’d said _me too_?’

‘Does it really matter, Col? Can we not just – do this now?’

Colin knows he should be able to – that he should just dig the words out of wherever words live, let them fly out of his mouth and see if they soar on the air. But he can’t.

‘You know what I like about acting?’ he says. ‘It’s not just that there’s always someone telling you what to do or giving you words that are so much better than any you’d ever think to say – it’s that you can do things over and over again, so if you fuck it up the first time through nerves or because you didn’t really understand your character, there’s always a second one, and a third, and a fourth. I mean how am I supposed to get the biggest moments of my life right with no chance to rehearse? And how is that fair, when if I need twelve takes to do something as simple as walk into a room, no-one thinks anything of it?’ 

Bradley looks at him, and Colin has that feeling again, like Bradley can see the bits beneath his ribs no-one’s ever supposed to see, the bits that slosh around and make up who he is. 

‘Ok.’ Bradley’s eyes shift – soften – and then he’s sitting differently, more upright and awkward, like the way he used to when his armour poked at his neck. ‘Can I be blunt? I feel like bluntness is – preferable, here,’ Bradley says, and at first Colin thinks it’s a coincidental echo of words. ‘For a while – ages, actually, I’ve been feeling this _thing_ between us. Well, this thing for you, I guess. Fact is, Col, I’m beginning to suspect we’re more than friends.’ Flicker like candlelight in his eyes, and a little smile, and Colin can almost taste the rank spinach thing and hear the shouts of the crew behind, can feel the tug of panic in his gut as he figures out what Bradley’s really saying. Bradley ducks and adds: ‘This is the bit where you say ‘me too’ before I make a giant twat of myself.’

The noise of the sea and the gulls disappears beneath the sound of Colin’s heart _thunk thunk thunk_ ing everywhere at once, it having totally forgotten Bradley drove hundreds of miles on a quest to see him on a half-baked postcard promise. Colin swallows, but he’s done this so many times inside his own head the words just happen on his tongue.

‘Me too. Me really, really, really too. That’s why I knock on your door at all hours and do all those weird things to your clocks – it’s so you’ll have to come and talk to me. It’s stupid, but I always think you won’t if there isn’t a reason.’

‘Well – I’m glad we’re on the same page,’ Bradley says. ‘Would’ve been pretty awful if only one of us felt like that, or the other had some daft notion about not doing anything romantic with co-stars.’

‘Worse than awful. Like Armageddon – or the apocalypse – maybe both of them rolled together in sprinkles of – hellfire. There’s no real analogy for the misery that would have wrought.’

Bradley laughs – big with relief that sounds entirely too real, and in fact it’s all so tremulous and shimmery with pretend that’s more real than reality, Colin feels like his insides have curled up to lodge in his throat. Bradley holds his gaze, careful and tender, like they’ve never really looked each other in the eye before – always focused instead on that bit between each other’s eyebrows Colin still doesn’t know the proper word for. Bradley’s closer, then, his lips brushing – like they’ve not already been all over Colin’s body – just on the corner of his mouth. It’s eager and cautious and fragile with first-ness, and Colin turns slightly into it, parts his lips to make it a proper kiss, soft and achy and squidgy inside. His insides simmer, simultaneously feeling fourteen and like it’s the most grown-up thing he’s ever done.

Colin blinks dumbly at Bradley’s eyelashes as he retreats. He can’t tell whether the _wow_ is in his head or if he actually says it, but either way he feels his mouth grin – the really, really wide and stupid kind – and realises that without a single hint of instruction from his brain, his hand has found a place for itself on Bradley’s chest, and if he allows himself a romantic notion it’s over his heart.

‘You’re so fucking beautiful when you really smile,’ Bradley says, just touching his chin, and Colin can’t think what to do with that, or what to do in this bit, all new and unrehearsed, so he bumps his forehead against Bradley’s and leaves it there while his heart stutters and his brain gives up on trying to have a whole thought.

‘I have no idea how to do this,’ he murmurs. 

‘Can you not just – you know, be in the moment and see what happens?’

Bradley meets his eye – knowingly, like he gets it all far better than Colin has a right to expect. Colin breathes in, long and slow, waiting for the air to turn frail and too thin, or clog up his lungs with fear and uncertainty. He wants to say something about how the reality of this makes fright spark under his toenails and flusters his shins, but he can’t think of how to phrase it in a way which makes it sound like something other than nonsense. So he just holds Bradley’s gaze and keeps on leaning, because at least his forehead feels like it wants to stay where it is.

Bradley sort of goes with it, maybe expecting him to stop – bunching his hands in Colin’s top when he doesn’t – and then he’s tipping onto the stones and taking Colin with him. They land in a skittering of pebbles, him half on Bradley’s chest with his knees digging their own hole in the beach. Bradley’s laughter against his nose quiets a protest that starts: _see? Useless_ , because Colin thinks from somewhere in the distance potentially it looks sweet, and more importantly, it feels pretty sweet, too. And sort of lop-sidedly perfect. He eases in for a kiss to make the most of it, but before he gets there, there’s a _shoosh_ of wave too close and a canter of freezing white horses over his feet.

‘Sh – ’

Bradley gasps – wide-eyed and startled – as water washes up his legs. Colin’s bones leap under his skin, and he tries to get purchase to follow them up, but Bradley clings to him, spluttering a breathless exclamation to god and weighing him down too much to quite find the leverage. Colin thinks: _fuck it_ , and gathers Bradley into a kiss instead, laughing and swearing into his mouth as a fresh lap of a wave pushes a new rash of goosebumps up his spine. Bradley gives in too – wet, cold hands on his face, as he responds with warm, smiling lips. Colin presses into him, lifting up onto his knees to change the angle, sinking again as soon as he’s done it on the shifting sand, clinging to Bradley’s hair to taste all he can of his mouth. 

He tries to say something profound about moments, that if they’re like this then yes, yes he can live in them, but it comes out as a happy murmur and a bit of a shiver. And then he gets this feeling -- it stirs up from his toes, tickles his knees, and finally lodges behind his bellybutton: there is a script; he’s been writing it for years; only he didn’t know, at the time, that’s what it was.

‘Can we get a labrador?’ Colin says. He wipes a bit of damp, gritty sand off Bradley’s cheek, making it worse because his hands are covered in the stuff. ‘And cats – cats who hate everything, especially the labrador and really especially you – but not Chloe – they love Chloe because everybody does, right?’

‘You’re talking about getting a dog, Colin? We haven’t even, like, been on a date.’

‘I didn’t create emotional Armageddon because I was scared to go on a date with you. That’d be ridiculous.’

Bradley bites back a laugh, and he rolls his eyes, and with sand and sea in his hair he mumbles:

‘What are we calling the dog, then?’

‘Moppit. You’ll see why the first time you tell it off.’

‘Why am I telling the dog off?’

‘Because you’ve had a bad day, and sometimes you’ve a bit of a temper – that’s why the cats hate you – but even if you shout at her, you know Moppit will forgive you and still sleep on your feet,’ Colin says. 

‘And you?’ 

‘I’ve no plans to sleep on your feet, whether you shout at me or not.’

Bradley’s cold fingernails scuff the back of his neck and make his spine try to crawl into itself. He tightens his fingers, and he gives Colin’s neck a little, gentle shake.

‘But you’ll definitely be there? In this menagerie where everyone hates me and I’m clearly very misunderstood?’

Bradley’s words are joking but his eyes and fingers are serious, so Colin says:

‘Yeah. Yeah I will – except when I’m working, which I’m going to do less of, I think, assuming I’ve a career to go back to.’

‘Of course you – ’

‘Good, because I hate gin and I really do love acting – I’m just going to need you to remind me every now and then that I want something better than paper flowers on my grave.’

There’s no way Bradley can really have any clue what Colin means, but apparently he’s conveyed some vague sense of it because Bradley grins, and kisses him, licking the salt off his lips. 

Clouds bloated with rain skid above them and all the way to the horizon, wind tickling like an echo of everything still to happen as it turns the sea grey to spray about their knees. Colin thinks maybe his words will never do exactly what he intends, that he’ll always prefer the safety of a script, and maybe that’s why he’s lucky to have found someone who gets it, and can always apparently see what his insides are doing so it doesn’t matter if he fluffs his lines. Bradley murmurs something about getting out of here before they wash away with the tide, and Colin’s freezing, but he tells him _in a minute_ , because he wants to enjoy the moment, the one where the ghosts he left here finally sank between the stones. And he doesn't know quite how this ends, yet, but he doesn't mind it, and he thinks: 

_if you’re going to mend a broken heart, maybe the seaside is the place._


End file.
